Advise requested and suggestions welcome - Mailing list pgsql-general

This is one of those “help me decide” petitions. Our company
requires a database engine capable of handling at least 200
connections simultaneously. The tables in that database are
interrelated to the extent that it would not be practical to divide
them in more than one physical database.

The size of this database will increase on a daily basis. We would
like to keep, on line, at least 2 years of our operations. Our
calculations indicate about 9-10 GB of disk space will be required.

We will want to keep in “read-only” databases old information, ready
to be used for decision making applications.

We will most likely be using C++ Builder 5(+) for our applications.
We would like to be able to count on VCL objects that have been
exhaustively tested in actual applications.

We have not had a good experience with a commercial database (SQL)
server. The product works fine most of the time, but it does fail
unexpectedly once in a while and we have not been able to get the
company to react in the direction of fixing the bugs causing the
sporadic failures. There are at least two “open source” SQL servers
that we have been testing: Interbase and PostgreSQL.

The C++ Builder 5 includes the IBX objects, and using these objects
our applications would not even require the installation of packages
like BDE or even ODBC drivers to connect to our Interbase servers.
(It is our intention to host our Interbase or PostgreSQL servers in
Linux machines, with several CPU’s and database serving dedicated).
Though C++ Builder 5 does not include VCL objects for PostgreSQL, we
have found at least one free set of VCL’s (Zeos DBO) that would
allow our applications to install in client machines without BDE or
ODBC.

The big question is: are either Interbase or PostgreSQL SAFE? Our
commercial product has been SAFE, in the sense that after two years,
we have lost only 25 minutes of operations, due to corruption
(generated by the program itself) on its own recovery log files.

Why would we want to abandon such a safe SQL Server for another one
whose level of safety we don’t know?

This is where you, the community of PostgreSQL and Interbase
programmers and users, can help us. Have we had a good, safe
performance compared to what you know from your daily activities? Do
you know of successful operations in PostgreSQL or Interbase where
operations similar in dimension as ours are being run?

Would you say that 200 simultaneous users, several thousand (5-10)
committed transactions daily and 25 minutes lost in 2 years is a
good, regular, expectable, better than average or less than average
considering that the database server DOES FALL dumping core files 3
or 4 times a month?

Would you stick with this product or would you try to find one that
will not fall generating core files and die 3 or 4 times a month?
Would you say it is “impossible” to get zero down time in this kind
of products (SQL servers)?

Your comments will be highly appreciated.

F J Fortuny