Re: Money... - Mailing list pgsql-general

From: "Christian Marschalek" <cm@chello.at>

> Since Oracle's prices are somewhat huge, I'm forced to switch to
PostgreSQL!
> I would have used it from the start, if I just knew of it's existance ;o)

One place Oracle beats PostgreSQL hands down is the size of its marketing
budget.

> Now, I wonder if PostgreSQL is used for some commercial projects?
>
> After all I've read about PgSQL, I'm preaty amazed of what it does!
> I know it's faster than MySQL and 2 other commercial products (which names
I

I know the benchmark you're talking about, and like all others YMMV. For
simple projects MySQL is a good few times faster than PG (I use both), but
if you're looking to replace Oracle then I'd say PG is more likely to fit.

> do not know), but I wonder how big the differance between let's say PgSQL
> and Oracle is ;o)

In terms of features, Oracle still has the edge on PostgreSQL - replication
is only just coming in, as is WAL (write-ahead logging) and TOAST for
large-text storage. I think the BLOB stuff is soon for a rewrite too.

I think Oracle lets you split a big query over several processors etc. and
PG doesn't have parameterised views or joins across databases yet.

Support for procedural languages is IMHO pretty good with plpgsql, tcl, perl
(early days) and C support. There are a couple of graphical admin tools, and
ODBC support if you need to access the database from Access/Visual Basic.
There is of course C, Perl, Java and PHP client support.

In terms of performance, there are people out there who get £1200/day to
tune/debug Oracle installations and are generally considered worth every
penny. So, on any given (expensive) hardware set I'd expect Oracle to be
able to outperform PostgreSQL with enough tweaking.

On the other hand, the money you save on Oracle licences can be spent on
bigger iron to run PG - so for non-exotic installations you should be able
to come out ahead. Certainly if you were thinking of Intel hardware I'd
expect PG to do well in terms of price/performance.

There is a link on commercial support on the www.postgresql.org website and
some of the firms employ various members of the core development team so the
quality of support should be good.

I consider the documentation to be excellent for an open-source project
(could do with better indexing) and the mailing lists are among the best
I've come across.

There is a (short) list featuring some projects using PG and a search of the
mailing lists/news should reveal some more.

> Thanks for your time in advance!
>
> regards

I'd recommend putting together a test rig and seeing if PG meets your needs.
One of the plus-points of open-source is if you need to move platforms you
haven't got the sort of barriers you can get with proprietry software.

If you or the powers-that-be feel the need of some additional security get a
support contract from one of the commercial firms and buy some backup
hardware with the money you save.

By the way - I'm not a developer/working for a support firm etc, just
another IT consultant so my opinions are just my own.

HTH

- Richard Huxton