Re: Differentiating different Open Source databases

On May 22, 2011, at 1:21 PM, Alastair Turner wrote:
> Excerpts from Rob Wultsch On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 10:01 PM:
>> ... primary persistent data store for the worlds largest social
>> network
>>
>> ... primary persistent data store for the worlds largest web
>> hosting provider, domain registrar and SSL registrar.
>>
>> ... primary persistent data store for the largest ad network
>>
>> ... "Does anyone run a farm with more than 1,000 Postgres
>> servers?".
>>
>> ... if PG was a better solution* it would be used
>
> In some ways you're saying proves Jim's point. A pragmatic definition
> of "better" would be "more appropriate" or "a better fit' - a better
> fit for the workload or possibly the organisation's existing skills
> and along with the skills habits and expectations.
>
> The examples you're quoting above are foreign to decision makers with
> a background in commercial RDBMSs like DB/2, MSSQL, etc. Insurance
> brokerages with 200 staff members don't care about 1000 server farms -
> they want expression indexes, partial indexes, CTEs and a bunch of
> other things which they've come to expect from relation databases.
>
> The mistake which these not entirely hypothetical managers (I have met
> a few too) are making about in assuming equality between all open
> source databases is much as the same as you mistake in claiming that
> the features which matter to myfacedoubleclickspacebook are the only
> ones that matter.

Right. It is especially easy for experienced database people to dismiss OSS databases because of missing features; things like materialized views, replication in Postgres, or stored procedures and triggers in MySQL (just to name a few). Throw in all the NoSQL OSS databases and things get even worse.

Postgres has advanced to a point where there aren't many features that we don't have that large databases do; materialized views and parallel query execution are the only two that come to mind. We even have features that other major databases don't have (we'll see if we beat MSSQL to the punch with KNN indexes). I'm hoping there's some way we can enlighten database professionals that not all OSS databases are the same, and the Postgres actually has most (if not all) of what they expect out of a large commercial database.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect jim(at)nasby(dot)net
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net