Re: DBMS Engines and Performance

On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Mikael Carneholm wrote:

> I'm tired of teenage 1337 skill0rz PHP hackers who go "whoaah, 0ms!" after
> running "select count(*) from forum_posts" in a single thread (the
> developer himself testing his app), and then claim "MySQL rocks! I tested
> the postgres 7.1 that came with <insert linux distro of choice here>, but
> it was twice as slow!!!! Postgres sucks!"

Mikael,

This crew of developers is not made up of kids. We don't know their
criteria for comparison of the two systems nor their experiences with them.
I suspect a lot of attitude comes from belief, not fact.

> Ask them what they know about concurrency: transaction isolation level,
> MVCC vs. locking, and how they do when they test OLTP performance in
> highly concurrent scenarios, and I'm sure you'll get a "huh?" as an
> answer.

It may well be that the XRMS CRM/SFA application does not use any of these
features so their implementation in postgres and not mysql matters not to
them.

The most effective response, IMO, is for a group of talented and
interested postgres developers to download the code, look for the
MySQL-specific parts, translate them to PostgreSQL-acceptable syntax, and
release it as a fork of the original. For quite a few months I monitored the
mail list and saw many requests for help with installation, use, and actions
not working. There is a lot of room for improvement.

There is also ZohoCRM, which _is_ postgres based, but comes with version
8.0.something and no ability to use what we already have installed. That's
another poor development decision. Why would I -- or anyone else -- want to
intstall a second, older version of the dbms on their system, just to run a
single application.

As the head of a very small consulting company, I could benefit greatly
from one of these CRM tools to track our marketing/sales efforts. From all
I've seen xrms has the feature set I like the best, but I'll take any that
work. I don't have the time, financial resources, or postgres/php skills to
make the conversion on my own. I'm confident that I would not be the only
happy beneficiary of a postgres port.

Rich

--
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D. | The Environmental Permitting
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. | Accelerator(TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863