Re: PostgreSQL vs Firebird SQL - Mailing list pgsql-general

From David Grelaud
Subject Re: PostgreSQL vs Firebird SQL
Date
Msg-id CABKm3phZ5n4pVFx2WQRbf4g27ZJZuOXB9RRC4srkamRVpkDx+w@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: PostgreSQL vs Firebird SQL  (Josh berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>)
List pgsql-general
I confirm what Josh berkus said. The performance will not be a problem as soon as you manage your database very well (good configuration, good hardware, good queries, good data organisation...), like a lot of other competitors I think?

We have never used Firebird but we use intensively PostgreSQL since 2011 on thirty servers (independently).
All our servers run an application which have 150 tables, more than 500 handmade queries, where more than 30 % are really complex (more than 2000 lines of code), using a lot of features (json, hstore, full text search, window functions, custom types, custom window functions, all kind of indexes, recursive queries, stored procedures, triggers, locks, a lot of CTEs, range types, arrays types...).
One of our server, which runs Ubuntu Server on a virtualized machine (4 cores, 16 Go RAM), has more than 100 millions of rows with more or less the same inserts, updates and deletes every day as you.
Hopefully, we've never experienced a data corruption until now ("crossed fingers").

David Grelaud

2016-02-10 8:06 GMT+01:00 Josh berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>:
On 02/10/2016 05:10 AM, ioan ghip wrote:
I have a Firebird SQL database running on one of my servers which has
about 50k inserts, about 100k updates and about 30k deletes every day.
There are about 4 million records in 24 tables. I have a bunch of stored
procedures, triggers, events and views that I'm using.
Firebird works fairly well, but from time to time the database gets
corrupted and I couldn't figure out yet (after many years of running)
what's the reason. When this happens I run "gfix -mend -full -ignore",
backup and restore the db and everything is fine until next problem in a
week, or a month.

I never used PostgreSQL. Yesterday I installed it on my development
machine and after few tests I saw that it's fairly easy to use.

Does anyone have experience with both, Firebird and PostgreSQL? Is
PostgreSQL way better performing than Firebird? Is it worth the effort
moving away from Firebird? Would I gain stability and increased performance?

Well, performance in PostgreSQL is largely dependant on your hardware. The numbers you're talking about seem pretty small to me, though; I can do 1000 inserts per *second* on a medium-sized AWS instance.  So I don't think performance will be your main concern.

I'm sorry to hear about your data corruption issues on Firebird.  That's dissapointing, especially since Firebird was one of the champion early open source databases.  Proof against database corruption is a major part of PostgreSQL.  I suggest turning on data checksums when you create your database (this is not the default option) just in case the corruption issue is actually your hardware.

PostgreSQL is a *server* database, though, so managing it is going to be fairly different from Firebird, which is primarily a desktop database. I suggest looking into pgAdmin4 to help with that.

--
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)


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