Re: Two questions from the boss (SQL:2003 && scalability)

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 03:40:23PM -0400, John Wells wrote:
> Guys,
>
> My boss has been keeping himself busy reading MySQL marketing pubs,
> and came at me with a few questions this morning regarding PostgreSQL
> features (we're currently moving to PostgreSQL).

I should point out that there's a whoile bunch of folks on the
-advocacy list who'd love to do any debunking necessary, if you want.

> situation, he wanted to know specifically whether PostgreSQL supported
> SQL:2003,

I know of no system which completely meets SQL 2003. Many of the
features in the 2003 standard are available in PostgreSQL, however,
and compliance with the standard is very much the goal of the
project. Given that MySQL has possibly the worst SQL standards
conformance of all systems claiming to conform, I can't imagine this
would be a real point of contention. (Note that MySQL is getting
much better on this front, but they still have a very long way to
go.)

> and what sort of capabilities PostgreSQL has to scale across
> multiple CPUs and hosts (multithreading, load balancing, etc).

PostgreSQL can scale across multiple CPUs, but it is not
multithreaded. Of the "across hosts" question refers to the new
table handler which sort-of mostly provides multi-master capability
to MySQL, I suggest _very strongly_ you get all the details on that
system before plonking down your money. There are some remarkably
serious problems with it, in my (not very humble) opinion. I did an
analysis of it this year for my employers. I'm not at liberty to
publish the resulting memo, but I would say that, at the very least,
it's important to understand how the table types, concurrency, and
transaction control all work together. (I believe one value for
"work together" there is "don't".)

A

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