Re: Scalability in postgres - Mailing list pgsql-performance

2009/5/29 Grzegorz Jaśkiewicz <gryzman@gmail.com>:
> 2009/5/29 Scott Marlowe <scott.marlowe@gmail.com>:
>
>>
>> Both Oracle and PostgreSQL have fairly heavy backend processes, and
>> running hundreds of them on either database is a mistake.    Sure,
>> Oracle can handle more transactions and scales a bit better, but no
>> one wants to have to buy a 128 way E15K to handle the load rather than
>> implementing connection pooling.  Show me an Oracle server with 5000
>> live, active connections and I'll show you a VERY large and expensive
>> cluster of machines.
>
> yes, because for that, oracle has nicer set of features that allows
> you to create cluster on cheaper machines, instead of buying one ;)

OTOH, I can buy a rather large Solaris box for the price of the
licenses on a RAC cluster.  Then I can take what's leftover and go on
vacation, then hire Tom Lane for a year to hack pgsql to run even
faster on my big sun server.  And then buy everyone at my office an
espresso machine.  Meanwhile, a team of several Oracle DBAs will still
be trying to get RAC up and running reliably.  But yes, they'll be
using a few $20k servers to do it.

> But other thing, worth noticing from my own experience is that you
> have to pay for Oracle so much, just to be able to enjoy it for a bit,
> people tend to buy better servers.

In my experience that's not really true.  Since Oracle charges per CPU
it's not uncommon to see people running it on a machine with the
absolute minimum # of CPUs to do the job.

> It feels more pro if you have to pay for it. That's the observation
> from UK, at least.

I don't think you can rightly speak for the whole of the UK on the
subject, anymore than I can speak for the whole of the US. :)

I think that professional is as professional does.  The real costs for
Oracle are the salaries you have go pay to the team of DBAs to make it
work and stay up.  I've never dealt with a database that needs as much
constant hand holding as Oracle seems to.  And, Oracle DBAs tend to do
one thing, and that one thing really well, since they're used to being
on a team.  So, you've got one guy to do production patching and
support, another guy to do query tuning, another guy to plan
deployments, and another guy to write plpgsql.  Then one or two other
folks for your app / db interfacing.

Much like a Formula One car, Oracle is an impressive bit of
technology.  But it's damned expensive to buy and more expensive to
operate.  Oracle's not some magic pixie dust that fixes all your DB
problems, it's got its own set of issues that it brings to the table.