Re: PostgreSQL vs. Oracle

On Monday 21 July 2003 10:58, Iavor Raytchev wrote:
> Hello Shidhar,
>
> Thank you for your reply.
>
> When we migrated form MySQL to PostgreSQL we did it not in a very rational
> way. We felt that there is something better and more excellent in
> PostgreSQL. Then our business grew. I think we could not have done what we
> did if we would have stayed on MySQL. Now we have the same feeling about
> Oracle. It has nothing to do with not liking PostgreSQL. It has more to do
> with climbing the next peak. The possibilities lie beyond.
>
> > Could you please elaborate on each term as in what do you expect
> > out of that functionality?
> >
> > e.g. Virtual private database? What is that? Unless I know what
> > to expect out of that functionality, how can anybody offer
> > an opinion or material on that?
>
> It is exactly what Oracle means by it. We are not starting a war here - but
> investigating comparisons.

I think the point is that Shridhar, like myself, hadn't come across that term
before. Don't forget, the members of a PG list aren't likely to all be Oracle
gurus. Likewise, I'm sure an Oracle DBA might find some reference links on PG
useful. Little things like good references can make the difference between an
interesting document and a valuable one.

As regards your topic headings, they're obviously the ones you think your
project will find useful, but:

Row Level Locking
Actually, AFAIK both offer "better than" row-level locking, since both use a
variant of MVCC (could be wrong though).

Partitioning
You can use symlinks to place individual tables/indexes on different drives
with PG. You can't do this while PG is running. Someone is working on a more
formal partioning system at the moment, so probably available in 7.4.x or 7.5

Virtual Private Database
Sorry - like Shridhar I'm not familiar with this. You can probably do
something similar with schemas/views/rules etc.

Standby databases
I'm assuming this is an Oracle term. There are people using standby systems
with shared access to a storage device if that's what you mean.

Speed
I'm not sure general opinion would agree that PG is faster than Oracle. I'm
personally not convinced it makes sense to compare speed except for a
specific situation. Certainly there will be some situations where PG is
faster and others where Oracle is.

Other comparisons
You might want to link to the conversion documents at
http://techdocs.postgresql.org

Standards
PG tries hard to be standards compliant. Oracle has its own share of wrinkles,
and I guess the problem is they can't afford to break backward compatibility.

You can find more on partitioning / standby systems by a search in the mailing
list archives. It might be interesting to see how you use PG at the present
time and what future changes you expect - the "general" list is a good place
to discuss that sort of thing.

HTH
--
  Richard Huxton
  Archonet Ltd