Thread: Report from MYGOSSCON
Hi all; First, I am very happy to report that PostgreSQL is very much alive and well in Malaysia. My booth was two booths down from a booth rented by the Abyres Group and staffed by both Abyres and EnterpriseDB employees. There were several other EnterpriseDB resellers there. In general, including EDB resellers (and on the other side those advertising MySQL expertise), PostgreSQL had a stronger showing than did Oracle/MySQL, even accounting for the size of the cube. After advocating PostgreSQL and the PostgreSQL community more or less non-stop for 2 days, my opinion of PostgreSQL as an RDBMS has only risen. Being able to explain why in many OLTP environments it is better than Oracle (Transactional DDL, easy partial unique indexes, some of the contrib mods), and the quality of the questions that people asked were excellent, I thought. All told we distributed 90 copies of the "What Is PostgreSQL?" flier, 50 copies of the PG Mag article "PostgreSQL at CNAF: 1 Billion SQL Queries per Day," and an unknown number of LedgerSMB fliers. Most of these materials were given to public sector employees. We got to hear success stories from within the Malaysian government, and I came away with a great deal of excitement. Or maybe I just drank too much caffeine ;-) Yes, free tea and coffee right in front of our booth is a dangerous thing. The entire region of South-East Asia seems to be looking more and more towards Free/Open Source Software and PostgreSQL is very attractive to everyone because it is the primary alternative to Oracle in OLTP environments. And so some questions I got that I was entirely unprepared to answer: 1) Contact points for internships? 2) How well translated are the PostgreSQL messages in Arabic? 3) How does PG compare to Sybase? 4) PostgreSQL certifications in Asia: Anyone offering them? Best Wishes, Chris Travers
Excerpts from Chris Travers's message of mié nov 30 10:08:33 -0300 2011: Great report! > And so some questions I got that I was entirely unprepared to answer: > 2) How well translated are the PostgreSQL messages in Arabic? I can answer this one: not at all. The translation status tables can be found at http://babel.postgresql.org/ and the Arabic code is "ar" -- there is no column in the tables for that language code. I hope whoever asked this is prepared to help ;-) -- Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Chris Travers <chris.travers@gmail.com> wrote: > 3) How does PG compare to Sybase? We converted to PostgreSQL from Sybase. We found: (1) PostgreSQL is more stable. We had been having a lot of problems with Sybase crashing on us with unexplained segfaults. (2) PostgreSQL has better support. In spite of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for a support contract with Sybase, they were very slow to fix bugs. Our runtime environment is unusual enough that we shook out some corner case bugs in PostgreSQL during our first few months, but every time we reported a bug we got prompt attention and were always *running with a fix* within 24 hours! Getting a bug fix from Sybase usually was on a time-frame of weeks or months, depending on severity. (3) PostgreSQL is faster. We had duplicate machines with identical (replicated) databases, so we could compare side-by-side. I have to be careful here, because the Sybase license prohibits posting any benchmarks of their product that they haven't approved by them in writing in advance. (I wonder why they include that in their license agreement?) I'll just say that PostgreSQL beat the pants off of Sybase in latency while load-balancing equally between the two with identical databases on identical hardware in production. PostgreSQL also performed better in all our saturation tests. And that was on PostgreSQL version 8.0. PostgreSQL performance has gone through dramatic improvements in several releases since then, and will again when 9.2 is released next year. I haven't heard anything about similar improvements in Sybase performance since then. (4) PostgreSQL is easier to manage. Managing 100 production databases and 100 development databases under Sybase we had needed one full-time person just to manage and check backups, and had still had problems with Sybase backups. Under PostgreSQL we were able to script our backups such that we are immediately alerted if incremental backups are failing to copy or failing to apply to the base backup. The "redundancy specialist" we needed for Sybase has been reassigned to other duties. So on the "total cost of ownership" equation, we found lower staff costs with PostgreSQL, besides the, um, significantly lower license and support costs. (5) PostgreSQL is more standard-compliant. We coded to the standard and had a thin portability layer in our framework, and found the lines of code needed to map the standard code to PostgreSQL was less than half that needed to map to Sybase. (6) PostgreSQL has more features. There are so many nice features available in PostgreSQL (for example, the text search features), that we have decided to move from focus on database independence to taking advantage of these features. (7) PostgreSQL is extensible. We have added features to PostgreSQL which required the addition of a separate layer with Sybase. The flexibility is dramatic -- I'm reluctant to try to illustrate it with an example, because it wouldn't do it justice. The fact that there is a free community version (which is what we use in the Wisconsin Court System) is the icing on the cake. In my view, PostgreSQL is just better than the alternatives. I can speak to the comparison with Sybase more directly than most alternatives, but I've worked with and reviewed other products, too. I just don't see why anyone would want to use any of the other products when PostgreSQL is so much better. -Kevin
Fantastic summary and great detail, Kevin, thanks! Somebody get this man a t-shirt! On 11/30/2011 10:55 AM, Kevin Grittner wrote: > Chris Travers<chris.travers@gmail.com> wrote: > >> 3) How does PG compare to Sybase? > > We converted to PostgreSQL from Sybase. We found: > > (1) PostgreSQL is more stable. We had been having a lot of > problems with Sybase crashing on us with unexplained segfaults. > > (2) PostgreSQL has better support. In spite of paying hundreds of > thousands of dollars per year for a support contract with Sybase, > they were very slow to fix bugs. Our runtime environment is unusual > enough that we shook out some corner case bugs in PostgreSQL during > our first few months, but every time we reported a bug we got prompt > attention and were always *running with a fix* within 24 hours! > Getting a bug fix from Sybase usually was on a time-frame of weeks > or months, depending on severity. > > (3) PostgreSQL is faster. We had duplicate machines with identical > (replicated) databases, so we could compare side-by-side. I have to > be careful here, because the Sybase license prohibits posting any > benchmarks of their product that they haven't approved by them in > writing in advance. (I wonder why they include that in their > license agreement?) I'll just say that PostgreSQL beat the pants > off of Sybase in latency while load-balancing equally between the > two with identical databases on identical hardware in production. > PostgreSQL also performed better in all our saturation tests. And > that was on PostgreSQL version 8.0. PostgreSQL performance has gone > through dramatic improvements in several releases since then, and > will again when 9.2 is released next year. I haven't heard anything > about similar improvements in Sybase performance since then. > > (4) PostgreSQL is easier to manage. Managing 100 production > databases and 100 development databases under Sybase we had needed > one full-time person just to manage and check backups, and had still > had problems with Sybase backups. Under PostgreSQL we were able to > script our backups such that we are immediately alerted if > incremental backups are failing to copy or failing to apply to the > base backup. The "redundancy specialist" we needed for Sybase has > been reassigned to other duties. So on the "total cost of > ownership" equation, we found lower staff costs with PostgreSQL, > besides the, um, significantly lower license and support costs. > > (5) PostgreSQL is more standard-compliant. We coded to the > standard and had a thin portability layer in our framework, and > found the lines of code needed to map the standard code to > PostgreSQL was less than half that needed to map to Sybase. > > (6) PostgreSQL has more features. There are so many nice features > available in PostgreSQL (for example, the text search features), > that we have decided to move from focus on database independence to > taking advantage of these features. > > (7) PostgreSQL is extensible. We have added features to PostgreSQL > which required the addition of a separate layer with Sybase. The > flexibility is dramatic -- I'm reluctant to try to illustrate it > with an example, because it wouldn't do it justice. > > The fact that there is a free community version (which is what we > use in the Wisconsin Court System) is the icing on the cake. In my > view, PostgreSQL is just better than the alternatives. I can speak > to the comparison with Sybase more directly than most alternatives, > but I've worked with and reviewed other products, too. I just don't > see why anyone would want to use any of the other products when > PostgreSQL is so much better. > > -Kevin > -- Ned Lilly President and CEO xTuple 119 West York Street Norfolk, VA 23510 tel. 757.461.3022 x101 email: ned@xtuple.com www.xtuple.com
Excerpts from Ned Lilly's message of mié nov 30 13:02:03 -0300 2011: > Fantastic summary and great detail, Kevin, thanks! > > Somebody get this man a t-shirt! I don't have t-shirts that would fit Kevin, so instead I created a wiki page pointing to his email. Similar to btrees, I had to also modify the ancestor pages all the way up to the root page to add links to it. Hopefully we can find more stuff to add to that section. http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Comparison_with_other_Database_systems The wiki maintainer is now expected to come up with the rotten tomatoes, so I'm leaving now. -- Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc. PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote: > Excerpts from Ned Lilly's message: >> Somebody get this man a t-shirt! > > I don't have t-shirts that would fit Kevin Hey! An XXL still works, if it doesn't shrink too much in the wash. So whaddaya expect? Wisconsin is known for it beer, and cheese, and beer, and sausage, and beer.... :-) -Kevin
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> wrote: > Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote: >> Excerpts from Ned Lilly's message: > >>> Somebody get this man a t-shirt! >> >> I don't have t-shirts that would fit Kevin > > Hey! An XXL still works, if it doesn't shrink too much in the > wash. So whaddaya expect? Wisconsin is known for it beer, and > cheese, and beer, and sausage, and beer.... I really must visit Wisconsin one day... -- Dave Page Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com Twitter: @pgsnake EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
Chris, Thanks so much for doing the booth! Let me know if you need to be reimbursed for printing costs. > And so some questions I got that I was entirely unprepared to answer: > > 1) Contact points for internships? Right now, just Google Summer of Code. > 2) How well translated are the PostgreSQL messages in Arabic? Poorly, if at all. We could use help with this. > 3) How does PG compare to Sybase? See Kevin's writeup. > 4) PostgreSQL certifications in Asia: Anyone offering them? SRA does in Japan and Fujitsu in Australia and India. I suspect they could be persuaded to expand. -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc. http://pgexperts.com