Re: PostgreSQL x Sybase

Thanks Mark,

You gave me very good tips..

The main reason of my question is that we have a ERP software house client
with many customers running PostgreSQL and one of their big customers is
trying go buy another ERP system that uses Sybase instead of PostgreSQL.

Now I´m sure it´s only a political issue for the customer, because I talked
to them about the system behaviour and the answer from the users was
unanimous: it´s nice, we´re happy and we don´t know why the boss would like
to change the system.

Anyway, my idea was to make a document with some strong reasons they should
not change to the Sybase ERP system, comparing only the database features.

Many thanks!

Reimer

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Aufflick" <mark(at)aufflick(dot)com>
To: "Reimer" <carlosreimer(at)terra(dot)com(dot)br>
Cc: <pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2006 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] PostgreSQL x Sybase

I'm not aware of one, but I would also be very interested.

Certainly Postgres is much more standards compliant. In terms of
developer features, Postgres is also much more advanced. Sybase also
has some unusual limitations in wierd areas like the maximum number of
bytes of index per row.

Sybase would traditionally beat the pants of Postgres when it comes to
database replication but I have not had the opportunity to test out
Slony.

I don't know how they would stack up in terms of scalability. I've
never reached the limits of either, having gotten as far as a million
or so rows per table in postgres (on cheap hardware) and 10s of
millions in sybase (on multi-cpu sun hardware). The traditional wisdom
would be that Sybase is very very fast on large datasets. As Postgres
(and Oracle) have improved and Sybase has somwhat stagnated, this
standard wisdom may not be as true as it used to be.

Not knowing your reason for asking, I would imagine the biggest two
questions to come up by decision makers would be speed and stability
under a large load and replication options. Of course if you have
existing code, porting issues will come into it.

A commonly overlooked comparison for "always on" systems is to compare
what sorts of operations you can do to databases without needing to
restart the server or drop tables, lock out users etc.

Sybase is not particularly expensive (compared to say Oracle), but the
support is not world class and new features come less often than in MS
Powerpoint.

If you google "sybase versus oracle" you will get a lot of results -
this might be a good way to start a sybase weakness/strength list.
Then you could insert the postgres features/weaknesses into the same
list. You would want to add postgres unique strengths like open
source, standards compliance, support community etc.

On 3/29/06, Reimer <carlosreimer(at)terra(dot)com(dot)br> wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Does anyone know of any recent comparisons of postgres vs Sybase?
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
> Reimer