Jonah,
> Hmm... I wonder how scientific his benchmarking is and how well his
> Oracle system was tuned. Because I've done quite a few performance
> comparisons between Postgres 8.3 and 8.4-dev against a well-tuned
> Oracle8i instance on Linux, and 8i (from 1999) beats the latest
> versions of Postgres quite handily on the same hardware.
What tests are you running? There are certainly things,
performance-wise, which Oracle does better than us. There are also
things they do worse.
I'll point out that, the last time we had public comparables
head-to-head, with *Oracle* doing Oracle's tuning on SpecJAppserver,
PostgreSQL was around 90% of Oracle *10* on analogous hardware. In
internal tests at Sun I can't quote directly, that comparison held on
succeeding generations of hardware I wasn't allowed to publish :-(
And I'd match the Sun performance labs' knowledge of Oracle tuning
against yours any day.
Not, on TPC-E on the other hand, Oracle is way ahead of us ... we were
like 50% last I checked, due mostly to the amount of time it takes us to
resolve lock conflicts vs. Oracle. Of course, Microsoft is beating
Oracle by 50%, so Oracle is not the one to match on that benchmark.
--Josh