Re: [GENERAL] Postgres vs commercial products

At 14:46 +0300 on 28/7/98, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Herouth Maoz wrote:
>
> > He didn't ask me what the features were. I'm quite willing to specify them.
> > Yes, I'm quite aware that many of them are in the pipeline... But hey, if I
> > install Oracle/Informix, I'd have them all *now*, tested and debugged by
> > many users before me.
> >
> > - Convenient tools for backing up, including scheduling of
> > backups. Same for vacuum and any other periodical maintenance.
>
> What to give me pointers to these? We use Oracle here, and the
> SOP from before I got here was to shutdown Oracle, backup the system and
> then restart Oracle up again. We're moving our backups to a centralized
> system, and using Oracle modules for doing this, but from our DBA's
> perusal of the Oracle documentation, there is nothing "convienent" about
> setting it up...

Personally, I don't know. All I know is that our computer center backs up
anything, even if it doesn't need backing up. Since we don't use Oracle as
yet, I can only give you the hearsay. That is, that most people seem to be
satisfied by Oracle's backup facilities.

> > - Support for raw devices (my sysadmin prefers it).
>
> This one I just checked about, and Oracle still appears to
> recommend using raw devices, as they claim it can be up to 50%
> faster...but, how would one implement this in PostgreSQL? So far, I
> believe you are the only one that is asking for it, so don't hold your
> breath on it ever getting done, but I'm curious, unless you wanted to
> implement it yourself...

I didn't. That was the whole point, wasn't it? I expect nothing from a free
database. Whatever is given, is great. PostgreSQL is far better featured
than other freebies, and that's why I use it. Functionality is missing?
Tough baby for me.

But if there is functionality that I miss, and the commercial product
offers, then Postgres is no match. The only thing that stands for it is the
price. So, eventually, you weigh functionality, reliability, cross-product
compatibility, on-site support, localization and training - against price.

Oracle is a much better, more mature RDBMS. Informix, too. Years will pass
before Postgres catches up - if ever. For its price, it's great. Trying to
compete against the commercial products by merit of functionality is not
serious.

On the other issue - about raw devices: the reason why it is supposed to
work better is because it cuts on the overhead of the system library calls
and implementation. That makes sense.

There was a claim that the system's library calls are optimized for the
given hardware, and therefore make a better solution. The truth is,
however, that these calls and data structures are optimized to handle
relatively small files. This makes sense, if I recall correctly how INodes
work (three levels of indirection for large files, wasn't it?)

True, raw devices require that the programmer will be able to anticipate
which devices will be used. But Oracle runs on almost every platform, does
it not? So it's possible to do it.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma