Jeff,
> Informix, etc. have spent a lot of time and money working on it.
> They also have the advantage of having many paid fulltime
> developers who are doing this for a job, not as a weekend hobby
> (Compared to the what? 2-3 full time PG developers).
I think 4-6 full-time, actually, plus about 200 part-time contributors. Which
adds up to a bloody *lot* of code if you monitor pgsql-patches between
versions. The only development advantage the commercials have over us is the
ability to engage in large projects (e.g. replication, raw filesystems, etc.)
that are difficult for a distributed network of people.
> The other advantage (which I hinted to above) with raw disks is being able
> to optimize queries to take advantage of it. Informix is multithreaded
> and it will spawn off multiple "readers" to do say, a seq scan (and merge
> the results at the end).
I like this idea. Has it ever been discussed for PostgreSQL? Hmmm .... we'd
need to see some tests demonstrating that this approach was still a technical
advantage given the improvements in RAID and FS technology since Informix
was designed.
As I have said elsewhere, Informix is probably a poor database to emulate
since they are effectively an old dead-end fork of the Ingres/Postgres code,
and have already been "mined" for most of the improvements they made.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco
