Re: Report from MYGOSSCON

Fantastic summary and great detail, Kevin, thanks!

Somebody get this man a t-shirt!

On 11/30/2011 10:55 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> Chris Travers<chris(dot)travers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> 3) How does PG compare to Sybase?
>
> We converted to PostgreSQL from Sybase. We found:
>
> (1) PostgreSQL is more stable. We had been having a lot of
> problems with Sybase crashing on us with unexplained segfaults.
>
> (2) PostgreSQL has better support. In spite of paying hundreds of
> thousands of dollars per year for a support contract with Sybase,
> they were very slow to fix bugs. Our runtime environment is unusual
> enough that we shook out some corner case bugs in PostgreSQL during
> our first few months, but every time we reported a bug we got prompt
> attention and were always *running with a fix* within 24 hours!
> Getting a bug fix from Sybase usually was on a time-frame of weeks
> or months, depending on severity.
>
> (3) PostgreSQL is faster. We had duplicate machines with identical
> (replicated) databases, so we could compare side-by-side. I have to
> be careful here, because the Sybase license prohibits posting any
> benchmarks of their product that they haven't approved by them in
> writing in advance. (I wonder why they include that in their
> license agreement?) I'll just say that PostgreSQL beat the pants
> off of Sybase in latency while load-balancing equally between the
> two with identical databases on identical hardware in production.
> PostgreSQL also performed better in all our saturation tests. And
> that was on PostgreSQL version 8.0. PostgreSQL performance has gone
> through dramatic improvements in several releases since then, and
> will again when 9.2 is released next year. I haven't heard anything
> about similar improvements in Sybase performance since then.
>
> (4) PostgreSQL is easier to manage. Managing 100 production
> databases and 100 development databases under Sybase we had needed
> one full-time person just to manage and check backups, and had still
> had problems with Sybase backups. Under PostgreSQL we were able to
> script our backups such that we are immediately alerted if
> incremental backups are failing to copy or failing to apply to the
> base backup. The "redundancy specialist" we needed for Sybase has
> been reassigned to other duties. So on the "total cost of
> ownership" equation, we found lower staff costs with PostgreSQL,
> besides the, um, significantly lower license and support costs.
>
> (5) PostgreSQL is more standard-compliant. We coded to the
> standard and had a thin portability layer in our framework, and
> found the lines of code needed to map the standard code to
> PostgreSQL was less than half that needed to map to Sybase.
>
> (6) PostgreSQL has more features. There are so many nice features
> available in PostgreSQL (for example, the text search features),
> that we have decided to move from focus on database independence to
> taking advantage of these features.
>
> (7) PostgreSQL is extensible. We have added features to PostgreSQL
> which required the addition of a separate layer with Sybase. The
> flexibility is dramatic -- I'm reluctant to try to illustrate it
> with an example, because it wouldn't do it justice.
>
> The fact that there is a free community version (which is what we
> use in the Wisconsin Court System) is the icing on the cake. In my
> view, PostgreSQL is just better than the alternatives. I can speak
> to the comparison with Sybase more directly than most alternatives,
> but I've worked with and reviewed other products, too. I just don't
> see why anyone would want to use any of the other products when
> PostgreSQL is so much better.
>
> -Kevin
>

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Ned Lilly
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