Re: Great Bridge benchmark results for Postgres, 4 others

I just want to add that these benchmarks actually somewhat validate my own
testing.
I was evaluating PostgreSQL vs. MS SQL Server two months ago. I ran a
series of tests that I felt approximated the load that was then current. We
had a database that ran on MS SQL Server, and I was trying to convince
management to switch to PostgreSQL. They weren't too happy about forking
over $12,000 just to license MSSQL on the 4 processor box.

My testing showed that for small (meaning simple) queries, which was the
lion's share of the work, PostgreSQL was about 20% faster than SQL Server.
Inserts, updates, and deletes were on par, and could vary from each other by
about 10% either way. It seemed that PostgreSQL was slower when inserting
records into tables with may indexes when the tables had many records (many
being > 500,000). The more complex the query got, the faster MS SQL Server
became. It seemed to be able to use an index in places that PostgreSQL
couldn't, and could use parallelism for some of the larger queries. But
since those kinds of queries are rare, they didn't impact the decision much.
Optimization is a tricky business to begin with.

They scaled up about the same. The only need is for about 25 internal
users, and a few concurrent internet users (using connection pooling). We
didn't test above that, because we didn't have the resources.

This company expects to grow their database greatly. It's currently at
about 70,000 records, but they expect to reach 500,000 in the not too
distant future. Toward that end, I performed the tests with 2,000,000
records, just to be sure.

This seems to weigh in on the advantage of PostgreSQL, but it doesn't tell
the whole story. The SQL Server machine was a Compaq 4x650 Xeon box, with
512 MB of RAM. The PostgreSQL machine was a Gateway ALR 1x600 Pentium III,
with 512 MB of RAM.

--
Adam Ruth
InterCation, Inc.
www.intercation.com

"Ned Lilly" <ned(at)greatbridge(dot)com> wrote in message
news:399AA636(dot)790ED86E(at)greatbridge(dot)com(dot)(dot)(dot)
> Hi Fabrice,
>
> We just ran the benchmarks, the same software that the trade magazines use
when they're
> evaluating commercial products. The results speak for themselves.
>
> We certainly don't want to over-boast... and I can assure you that every
assertion in
> that story was double and triple-checked for accuracy. People can draw
their own
> conclusions from the results - like all benchmarks, it's only useful
inasmuch as it
> gives you a directional indicator about the capabilities of the product.
Particularly
> in this case, since it was only a single-processor machine with only 1-100
users. But
> we wanted to share the results of our testing with the community, and
perhaps stimulate
> more formal testing by other "unbiased" parties (e.g. the technical trade
press).
>
> Regards,
> Ned
>
>
>
> Fabrice Scemama wrote:
>
> > Ned, I just love Postgres... I strongly believe it can compete
> > with major commercial DBMS, and that it rules over free DBMS
> > (be opensource or not, like MySQL).
> >
> > But I think Postgres' performance should not be over-boasted,
> > because such behaviour could only mislead and possibly deceipt
> > future users. As a commercial consulting company, you might
> > consider adding some disclaimers to your benchmarks.
> >
> > Fabrice
>