Re: Question: Who's Using Postgres

Hi,

I think we have a technically interesting product:

The application:

Logging Time & Attendance for employees, production time incl. machinery
for invoicing customers and efficiency reports, project times also for
customer invoicing, salary calculations including all kinds of weird
employee-contract specifics, and of course a lot of reports.

The system:

Little over 80 tables with an awfull lot of 'foreign keys' originally with
referential integrity. Time-stamp input (logging events) range from few
hundreds a day to several thousands a day (not that much ;-). Rather heavy
access in generating reports, though, since there is a lot of cross
referencing tables. In house this is running on PostgreSQL 7.1.2/3 on Linux
(Slackware 8.0) AMD K7 500MHz 512MB RAM. The database is only around 50MB with
one table having ~20MB. The datacollection (time events like job start, job
stop, break start, break stop) is done on a small 'terminal' specially
designed for the purpose. These terminals are connected on a two-wire network
to a special controller, communicating with a computer using RS232. The
interface program (called the OnLine program) is programmed in C++ and can run
on both Windows and Linux. In the in-house system the OnLine is running
directly on the database server. The OnLine program connects to the database
using ODBC, even on Linux.

A little history:

Our project started in the early days of M$Access (Access 2.0) where
everyone sought this was the way to go :-(, at least in my surroundings, my
company and our customers. The first project didn't go too well, the system
was certainly too complex for Access 2.0 and Windows 3.11. First with the
transition to Access 97, the system started to be usable. However, it was
still not performing very well and could only be used by small companies. At
this time we started using Informix as the backend running on Linux. This was
certainly early days for Informix on Linux. It worked, but was difficult to
administer and hard for 'novices' like us to get it working good. The main
problem was the ODBC driver on Windows and we tried 3 different brands
(including Informix' ), in several different versions. All of them needed a
lot of modification in Access frontend. Access is certainly not SQL 'clean'
and it is very hard to figure out what the JetEngine is doing. However, we got
it working, but performance was poor, some reports could take a couple of days
(yes, more than 24 hours !!!) and when does a Windows machine run for that
long ? ;-)

I had been playing with PostgreSQL on my own for some years, and finally
last spring we decided to make the move and transfer all data to PostgreSQL
7.1.2. As you all know installing and getting Postgres running is VERY easy
and everything including transferring data (I needed to write af few scripts
to do it and do a lot of testing) took only a few days. Having everything in
PG now the interesting part was to test performance, but first of course the
postgres ODBC driver was easy to set up, worked at first shot, and now the
performance: reports formerly taking those days were now done in few hours,
and with a bit of tweeking we got it down to about 1/2 hour and we really
didn't optimize it (no stored procedures or such). Some simpler reports (with
almost same results as the heavy ones) I did for our intranet, showing up in
split seconds. The system has now been running in-house for almost a year, no
break-down, no down time on the database. No NT restart every now and then.
(We have another in-house application running on WinNT/M$SQL Server that needs
to be restarted every 2. week, even with 1.5GB RAM.)

Additional:

Have a look at OpenACS (http://www.openacs.org) This is the ACS system
moved to PostgreSQL !! A very interesting project. There is also references to
sties/people using PG.

Greetings,

Leif

"Corey W. Gibbs" wrote:

> Good Morning Everyone,
> I have a general question about who is using Postgresql. This is not a
> marketing survey and any information I collect will only be used by me.
> Here's the background.
> I have a user who has developed a Visual Basic application that uses MS
> Access files for it's data storage. Currently, this datafile is about
> fifty megs in size. There are about fifteen users who use these files in
> the application, needless to say, this is having a severe impact on our
> network. After much heartache and pain, I was able to convince him that we
> need to look at a RDBMS to put the data on. Of course, I suggested
> Postgres as an alternative to MS SQL server for many reasons. Linux runs
> on all of my servers, I'm happy with it's performance and reliability. I'm
> currently running Postgres as my web server's backend. Opensource software
> does not scare me. However, his side of the camp comes from the Windows
> world. "It has to be MS SQL server. It'll be easier to program to than
> any other server." "Opensource software isn't going any where." "Can we
> depend on it?" are common questions and statements I have heard.
> I am not trying to start a ruckus or a flamewar, but I would like to know
> who's using Postgres out there. What's the application? How big are your
> databases? Are you using Visual Basic or C to connect to it through ODBC
> or are you using a Web interface?
> Any information you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
> thank you
> Corey W. Gibbs
>
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