> Stephen Birch <sbirch@ironmountainsystems.com> writes:
> Question: Is PostgreSQL ready for mission critical applications?
> [...]
I can *not* recommend using PostgreSQL for a mission critical application. I
have used PostgreSQL for a reasonably sized project, where it is used as
the central database for an ISP for administration of all users, accounts,
hosts, ip numbers, accounting, etc. The decision for PostgreSQL was based
on cost and features. Like you, I needed transactions and other goodies
like triggers and notifications, that no other freely available database
can provide.
I was very pleased with PostgreSQL in the beginning, but that changed after
a while. PostgreSQL is not really stable, in fact it is very easy to crash
the backend process that is handling the connection to your client and quite
often the other backends shut down, too. I have seen many random errors, for
instance sometimes loading a new stored procedure will crash the database,
while it works the next time. Sometimes databases grow over every bound
making the system slower and slower, the vaccum process needs hours to do
its work and nothing except a dump and rebuild of the database helps.
The most frustrating thing is that most bugs are not repeatable or at least
not repeatable in a small test script that I could send in with a bug report.
Looking at the bug reports that come through the mailing list, there are a
lots of the type: X works here but not in this similar situation. This is
IMHO a symptom of a bad design. A recent upgrade (I think it was from 6.5
to 6.5.1 or something like that) helped a little bit but on the other hand
some query optimizations that worked before didn't work anymore.
So all this leads to my conclusion: The system is not ready for prime time.
If you only use some basic functionality it might be ok, but if you (like
me) use everything from transactions to triggers, notification, user defined
types, stored procedurs and rules, you will probabely not be happy with it.
There is a very active developer community and I still have hope that
PostgreSQL will make it at some point (otherwise I wouldn't be following the
mailing list).
Jochen
--
Jochen Topf - jochen@remote.org - http://www.remote.org/jochen/