Re: Database market share 2004

Jurgen Haan wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
> > Jurgen Haan wrote:
>
> > There is another important reason too: Instrumentation. If they are
> > slow diagnosing why is a question of making guesses. That may be a
> > reasonable approach when supporting a small non-commercial web site.
> > It is a non-starter when talking terabytes and a requirement for 7x24.
> > And then there's that little problem with government requirements
> > around audits. They just aren't ready for prime-time.
>
> 24x7 is actually no problem with OSS db's like Postgres.
> At the company where I work we have a DB2 DB and a Postgres DB running.
> Neither of them have to be taken down during maintenance.

Next week I get to swap out two storage arrays on a 500-gbyte db2 udb database server: the new arrays are larger and faster. Anyhow, one nice feature about db2 is that I can add the new arrays & remove the old ones in a relatively simple operation in which the database handles rebalancing all data automatically, and everything is online the entire time. Didn't think postgresql was up to that yet.

> What's a big problem with postgres (and actually one of the main reasons
> why we don't use it for our sensitive information) and that's that
> postgres is extremely unrelyable in high TPS situations.
> Scalability with OSS databases just plain sucks (if any).

Although I really like postgesql, the biggest reasons not to use it in production for us are:

1. If it can't do everything then we need db2 as well. Standardizing on db2 is simpler than maintaining a mix of skills, procedures, products, etc.
2. postgresql doesn't support query parallelism or partitioning. This means that db2 table scans run about 40x the speed of postgresql table scans (assuming a 4-way server and typical partitioning benefits).
3. db2 is pretty inexpensive in its small-server editions (workgroup, express, etc). So the savings of going with postgresql is more than wiped out by the additional hardware requirements.

> But still I think OSS databases are to be reconed with.
>
> It's the same as the early 90s, Linux, what a cute little project, but
> it surely will never be of any importance. Now, just take a look a the
> linux population among Internet web servers.

Yep, postgresql is on track to be a cool DBMS.

buck Received on Mon Jun 06 2005 - 16:27:21 CDT