Kieran wrote:
> I'm currently starting to evaluate Open Source RDBMSs for use in a
> high-volume, high-availability environment.
>
> <rest snipped>
OK, thanks to all who replied.
In case anyone's curious as to the motivation of my question, I've been
asked to look into rough first year hardware + software costs required
for a 'web services' offering, assuming it'll go live Q4 2004. (And how
to minimise them!).
So far, the only major non in-house software component where an open
source product is not quite ready for what we want to do is the RDBMS.
I'm guessing that an RDBMS with full transaction + recovery support is
of similar (if not greater) complexity than a POSIX kernel, and far more
complex than a web server. But I'm sure PostgreSQL developers already
know that....
Now I've got some pointers, I'm going to have to do some more research
myself, but from what I gather, it looks like there's a good chance that
by version 7.4 PostgreSQL will be able to compete with Oracle / Informix
for the particular application domain I'm interested in.
Certainly, the pgreplication project looks very encouraging, as does the
Point-in-time recovery mentioned. I'll also look into the (non-free)
eRServer, as well as rserv and dbmirror. As Tom Lane pointed out,
focusing on mirroring to a remote slave rather than requiring
incremental backup does make more sense (at least to me).
Unfortunately I'm not in a position to pay external developers even
though I suspect doing so would be cheaper than, say, a 16-CPU Oracle
licence :-). Hopefully, we'll eventually be able to contribute something
back either to PostgreSQL or the open source community in general.
Thanks once again,
Regards,
Kieran Elby
