Re: [PATCHES] O_DIRECT for WAL writes

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

> The bottom line here seems to be the same as always: you can't run an
> industrial strength database on piece-of-junk consumer grade hardware.

Sure you can, though it may take several bits of piece-of-junk
consumer-grade hardware. It's far more about how you set up your system
and implement recovery policies than it is about hardware.

I ran an ISP back in the '90s on old PC junk, and we had far better
uptime than most of our competitors running on expensive Sun gear. One
ISP was completely out for half a day because the tech. guy bent and
broke a hot-swappable circuit board while installing it, bringing down
the entire machine. (Pretty dumb of them to be running everything on a
single, irreplacable "high-availablity" system.)

> ...they blame us when they don't get the same results as the guy
> running Oracle on...

Now that phrase irritates me a bit. I've been using all this stuff for
a long time (Postgres on and off since QUEL, before SQL was dropped
in instead) and at this point, for the (perhaps slim) majority of
applications, I would say that PostgreSQL is a better database than
Oracle. It requires much, much less effort to get a system and its test
framework up and running under PostgreSQL than it does under Oracle,
PostgreSQL has far fewer stupid limitations, and in other areas, such
as performance, it competes reasonably well in a lot of cases. It's a
pretty impressive piece of work, thanks in large part to efforts put in
over the last few years.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
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