Re: Is PostgreSQL ready for mission critical applications?

> Stephen Birch <sbirch(at)ironmountainsystems(dot)com> writes:
> Question: Is PostgreSQL ready for mission critical applications?

I think it is. In my office, we are converting hundreds of thousands of
digitized documents (each of which is comprised of multiple TIFF images)
into PDF documents. This has been going on since April or so. We are
using Postgres 6.4 under Linux (PPro 200 w/128 megs of RAM), with the
original images stored on Novell servers. This is almost a 24x7 process,
as we are constantly running conversion batches and going through QC
processes before the images are backed up and put into offline storage. We
are using Perl for the application front end (as CGI), and Image Alchemy
for the conversion, and Postgres for the batch maintenance. This system
absolutely required transaction support, especially in the QC process.
On top of this, we are using the same server to run a simple search engine
based around Postgres to retrieve adverse drug reaction reports -- this
database has several million rows across several tables, using a PHP3
frontend. Here, though, speed is not the consideration but reliable
performance is. PostgreSQL has been very stable and I have no reason to
question its reliability. We are going to be moving our drug reaction
database over onto its own server soon and providing public (although
secure) access in the near future -- it will be using a mod_perl frontend,
along with the the PostgreSQL fulltext module.

So I think PostgreSQL is quite solid and reliable. The only thing I think
that is sorely needed in PostgreSQL is referential integrity constraints
like foreign keys (although this can be emulated with triggers).

On the other hand, I have been using MS-SQL 7 for several months now, for
another project, and am not at all happy with it -- it has crashed on me
several times (because of some flaky OCXs), even though I was only doing
database design and not doing production work, and I am frustrated by the
lack of user-defined functions that I have taken for granted in
PostgreSQL.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy/
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