Re: How to manage/tune PostGres

Philippe,

First off, welcome to the club. We're primarily an Oracle shop, but due to Oracle's pricing we are using PostGreSql for web based applications.

Why PostGreSql. Well first off it provides a much smaller learning curve for our developers than MySql does. MySql, until this last iteration, did not support stored procedures, packages, triggers, etc..... PostGreSql does and with the simple "create language plpgsql" command and one additional line in the Oracle procedure it works in PostGreSql just fine. PostGreSql can also be backed up hot, pg_dump, whereas MySql has to be shutdown. PostGreSql likes Java stored procedures, little bit more work to get initially setup, but then after your Oracle Java procedures move over almost effortlessly. Again PostGreSql handles data in a very similar fashion to Oracle. Read consistent view is there, don't count on that with MySql without the add on.

So if you or your boss is looking for a comparison it kinda falls like this:

Open Source Commercial equivalent

PostGreSql Oracle
MySql Sql*Server or more appropriately Access.

BTW: the admin and tuning needs on PostGreSql appear to be less than Oracle, that is assuming you've setup Oracle in the usual non intelligent way.

Dick Goulet
Senior Oracle DBA
Oracle Certified 8i DBA

-----Original Message-----
From: Philippe Lefevre [mailto:philippe(dot)lefevre(at)barclays(dot)co(dot)uk]
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:10 AM
To: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: [ADMIN] How to manage/tune PostGres

Hello all,

My company mainly use Oracle as database but we would like to make some
tries with some open source database.
I think PostGreSQL might be candidate for our project.
I read several documents on it, but I wasn't able to find any infos on what
are exactly the needs, in term of administration,
and, if any, how to manage/tune that database in a production context. Are
there any graphical tools to do this ?
(like OEM for example)
MySQL, an other open source database, is available. What are the reasons
that makes me happy to put my choice on PostGreSQL ?
Thank you in advance for any info.
PhL

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