Thread: PostgreSQL and Data warehousing question
Hi everyone, Just had this question asked of us through the Advocacy site's "request" form: *********** We are in the process of evaluating an alternative platformm for our data warehouse environment. We currently use Oracle 9i and are thinking about going to Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 1) Is a DW environment an appropriate use of PostgreSQL? We also use standard DW tools that we would want to continue to use. 2) Could we continue to use our Informatica Power Center suite of tools to peform our ETL processes?, and are their 'hooks' available for Informatica? We would also want to continue to use our data modeling tool, ErWin, to create the DDL to build our DW tables. Will this DDL work with PostgreSQL? And we can't leave out the BI layer. Would be able to use our standard BI tools, i.e. Power Analyzer, Crystal, Cognos, etc.? If you know of anyone that has replaced their current SQL Server 2000 environment or Oracle environment I would appreciate references. Thank You. *********** Does anyone here have experience with Data Warehousing, and be able to give some advice as to PostgreSQL's suitability for it in regards to this? Am asking here as I have no clue of the answer(s) other than PostgreSQL does work with Crystal Reports, and hoping people can assist. The person who emailed us sounded like they might not want it known that they're looking at alternatives, that why his name and email haven't been included. :-) Regards and best wishes, Justin Clift -- "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there." - Indira Gandhi
Justin Clift wrote: > Does anyone here have experience with Data Warehousing, and be able to > give some advice as to PostgreSQL's suitability for it in regards to > this? Am asking here as I have no clue of the answer(s) other than > PostgreSQL does work with Crystal Reports, and hoping people can assist. > I have found Postgresql quite suitable for data warehousing : - optimizer does star queries well - often better than 9.0.1, but slower than 9.2.0 - fast load utility (COPY) is fast (not quite as fast as Oracle 9i) - simpler to administer and tune compared to Oracle 9i I would recommend that prospective buyers try this sort of thing out - and I have (attempted) to make this very thing easy - see: http://sourceforge.net/projects/benchw. Its a "cut down", easy to run data warehouse benchmark. ( works against Oracle and Postgresql and several others) With respect to the query and modelling tools, I am not sure, my experience has been with folk using JDBC ad-hoc query type applications, which are quite Db agnostic. Cheers Mark
On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 20:47, Justin Clift wrote: > > 2) Could we continue to use our Informatica Power Center suite of tools > to peform our ETL processes?, and are their 'hooks' available for > Informatica? > > We would also want to continue to use our data modeling tool, ErWin, to > create the DDL to build our DW tables. Will this DDL work with > PostgreSQL? And we can't leave out the BI layer. Would be able to use > our standard BI tools, i.e. Power Analyzer, Crystal, Cognos, etc.? > Crystal reports works fairly well via ODBC. Erwin 3.x has some support for postgresql, though it's not great if you write postgresql specific stuff. My understanding is this has been improved in later versions of erwin, though I've not tried them. FWIW all of these tools should work on some level due to odbc (or perhaps jdbc) compatibility. The quality of support though is probably less than that for oracle or sql server, but it it's still likely they would be good enough to do the job. Robert Treat