Re: Hope for a new PostgreSQL era?

On Dec 8, 2011 1:27 PM, "Chris Travers" <chris(dot)travers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Additionally I am not entirely sure what he means by the last point.
> If you look at the work that NTT along with EDB has put into
> Postgres-XC, for example, it looks to me like the Postgres ecosystem
> is growing by leaps and bounds and we are approaching an era where
> Oracle is no longer ahead in any significant use case.

While Pg is impressively capable now, I don't agree that Oracle (if DB2,
MS-SQL etc) isn't ahead for any significant use case. Not on a purely
technical basis anyway - once cost is considered there may be a stronger
argument.

Multi-tenant hosting is a weak pint for Pg for quite a few reasons, done of
which appear below. It's not the only role Pg isn't a great fit for, but
probably one of the more obvious.

Areas in which Pg seems significantly less capable include:

- multi-tenant hosting and row level security

- admission control, queuing and resource limiting to optimally load a
machine. Some limited level is possible with external pooling, but only by
limiting concurrent workers.

- performance monitoring and diagnostics. It's way harder to find out
what's causing load on a busy Pg server or report on frequent/expensive
queries etc. Tooling is limited and fairly primitive. It's find, but
nowhere near as powerful and easy as some if the other DBs.

- prioritisation of queries or users. It's hard to say "prefer this query
over this one, give it more resources" or "user A's work always preempts
user B's" in Pg.

- transparent failover and recovery back to the original master.

- shared-storage clustering. Dunno if anyone still cares about this one
though.