Re: Trade Study on Oracle vs. PostgreSQL

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Lincoln Yeoh <lyeoh(at)pop(dot)jaring(dot)my> wrote:
> At 12:20 AM 9/25/2010, Scott Marlowe wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Steve Atkins <steve(at)blighty(dot)com> wrote:
>> >  Again, you'd need to run them on comparable hardware and tune them both
>> > well.
>>
>> Actually I'd argue that pgsql gets better hardware since you can spend
>> the money you'd spend on oracle licenses on hardware for pgsql.  At
>> $20k per cpu on oracle (or more if you need clustering, GIS, or a few
>> other features) you can buy a pretty damned impressive pgsql server to
>> compete.
>>
>> But definitely don't put pgsql on an old workstation and expect it to
>> keep up with a real server running oracle that's been tuned properly.
>
> I think Oracle usually gets better hardware, since if Management wants
> Oracle, the expensive hardware doesn't look so expensive next to it :).
> Whereas if Management gives you a tiny or zero budget, most sane people
> don't go for Oracle (even though there are "first dose is free" options). So
> your options then become Postgresql on an old workstation ;).

That's very true. OTOH, I took an old workstation with a dual core
CPU and put 4 SATA drives in it in RAID-10 and made a reporting server
that was much faster than our Oracle server it grabbed the data from.
So that's often a good way of getting your foot in the door.