Re: Compared MS SQL 2000 to Postgresql 9.0 on Windows

On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Tom Polak
<tom(at)rockfordarearealtors(dot)org> wrote:
> What kind of performance can I expect out of Postgres compare to MSSQL?
> Let's assume that Postgres is running on Cent OS x64 and MSSQL is running
> on Windows 2008 x64, both are on identical hardware running RAID 5 (for
> data redundancy/security), SAS drives 15k RPM, dual XEON Quad core CPUs,
> 24 GB of RAM.  I have searched around and I do not see anyone ever really
> compare the two in terms of performance.  I have learned from this thread
> that Postgres needs a lot of configuration to perform the best.

I think this is a pretty difficult question to answer. There are
certainly people who are running databases on hardware like that -
even databases much bigger than yours - on PostgreSQL - and getting
acceptable performance. But it does take some work. In all fairness,
I think that if you started on PostgreSQL and moved to MS SQL (or any
other product), you'd probably need to make some adjustments going the
other direction to get good performance, too. You're not going to
compare two major database systems across the board and find that one
of them is just twice as fast, across the board. They have different
advantages and disadvantages. When you're using one product, you
naturally do things in a way that works well for that product, and
moving to a different product means starting over. Oh, putting this
in a stored procedure was faster on MS SQL, but it's slower on
PostgreSQL. Using a view here was terrible on MS SQL, but much faster
under PostgreSQL.

The real answer here is that anything could be true for your workload,
and asking people on a mailing list to guess is a recipe for
disappointment. You probably need to do some real benchmarking, and
PostgreSQL will be slower at first, and you'll tune it, and it's
LIKELY that you'll be able to achieve parity, or close enough that
it's worth it to save the $$$. But you won't really know until you
try it, I think.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company