Re: Postgres vs. Progress performance

jb(at)sourceillustrated(dot)com ("John Wells") writes:
> To that end, I've also started studying up on Postgresql. It seems to
> have all the necessary features for a transaction heavy DB. The recent
> release is 7.3. Of course, "the proof will be in the pudding." We
> average 2.5 million transactions per day or 800 per second.
> Unfortunately, we would have no way of testing that until we committed to
> getting the business logic moved over and had something to test it with.
> This is a bit of a "catch 22" situation. Just wished I knew of someone
> locally who was running Postgresql in such a heavy environment. I'd love
> to find out how it performs for them. -----------

The killer question is of what exactly it is that is being done 800
times per second.

I have seen PostgreSQL handling tens of millions of "things" per day,
when those things are relatively small and non-interacting. If most
of the 800 are read-only, then that seems not at all frightening.

If the activity is update-heavy, with complex interactions, then the
"level of challenge" goes up, irrespective of what database system you
plan on using.

It would seem surprising for a well-run PostgreSQL site to not be
quite readily as capable as Progress on similar hardware, but it is
not a trivial task to verify that with something resembling your kind
of transaction load.

What you, in effect, need to do is to construct a prototype and see
how it holds up under load. That's a nontrivial amount of work,
irrespective of the database in use.

I think you'll need to construct that prototype, perhaps as a set of
scripted "clients" that you can spawn to hammer at your "server." A
wise approach is to write this in a somewhat generic fashion so that
you can try it out on several different databases. Or so that you can
at least express, to management, the possibility of doing so :-).

Question: What kind of hardware are you using for the present system?
--
output = reverse("ofni.smrytrebil" "@" "enworbbc")
<http://dev6.int.libertyrms.com/>
Christopher Browne
(416) 646 3304 x124 (land)