Re: PostgreSQL vs. Oracle vs. Microsoft

Randolf Richardson wrote:
> > The best DB platform is what they currently have, regardless of what
> > they have, unless there is a very compelling reason to switch.
> [sNip]
>
> Have you heard the saying "Nobody ever got fired for picking IBM?" It
> is one of those situations where if they don't spend the money in their
> budget, then they lose it the next time around (no suggestions are needed
> on this issue, but thanks anyway).

If that's their situation, then they're almost certainly better off
throwing the additional money at beefier hardware than at a more
expensive database engine, because the amount of incremental
performance they'll get is almost certainly going to be greater with
better hardware than with a different database engine. In particular,
they're probably best off throwing the money at the highest
performance disk subsystem they can afford. But that, like anything
else, depends on what they're going to be doing. If it's likely to be
a small database with lots of processor-intensive analysis, then a
beefier CPU setup would be in order. But in my (limited) experience,
the disk subsystem is likely to be a bottleneck long before the CPU is
in the general case, especially these days as disk subsystems haven't
improved in performance nearly as quickly as CPUs have.

--
Kevin Brown kevin(at)sysexperts(dot)com