Re: PostgreSQL x Oracle

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Karel Zak wrote:

> > > > What about speed?? Is Oracle faster than PostgreSQL?? Why?? I believe
> > > > that some day the PostgreSQL development team will improve the engine and
> > > > it will be as fast as Oracle.
> > >
> > > Speed? Use MySQL :-) I think real relation database use is not about
> > > speed only -- it means speed is not always most important argument. I
> > > sure people use Oracle for the others features.
> >
> > Not too good of an argument. It gives an impression that postgresql community
> > want to hide behind features and claim that speed is not necessary. Sounds very

i think this a fantastic argument, one more people should consider. if you
want speed AND a RDBMS you need to rethink your rational - for example, how
many people using mysql have schemas so simply that any key->value type
database (BDB) would suffice? here in my group we store metadata in a
postgresql database to ensure data integrity, to foster development, and to
centralize metadata management. accessing _any_ RDBMS (note that mysql is
_not_ a RDBMS) from our near-realtime system would be madness or expesive in
oracle's case - we offload recent versions of crucial metadata sets into
berstein's CDB (constant databases) for access by these processes, which are
read only. even if we required write databases i would consider berkeley db,
or any other database with the overhead of parsing sql.

talking about speed and an RDBMS is like optimizing java code - just write it
in c and be done with it!

IMHO 'speed is not necessary' and impossible to acheive with _any_ RDBMS and
so should not be considered.

-a

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