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Novell Releases PostgreSQL for NetWare
An anonymous reader writes "Ever since Oracle announced they wouldn't port 9i to NetWare, Novell has been scrambling to find an enterprise-capable DB. Now it looks like they're settling on PostgreSQL. This follows their decision to ship Apache as the default web server for NetWare 6. Linux aficionados might sneer at an old workhorse like NetWare, but it's got more than 80 million client licenses worldwide, and it ain't going anywhere anytime soon."
I don't consider PostgreSQL as an alternative to Oracle. PostgreSQL is a nice DB, but it isn't the be all end of of dbs. But then again neither is Oracle. If I had to choose between the two it wouldn't be cut and dry until you gave me the circumstances. Personally I use PostgreSQL in my business environment and it has worked flawlessly so far. Granted it doesn't run MC applications (Mission Critical) But it is used to make major business decisions (more or less data-warehousing)
I wouldn't dismiss PostgreSQL so quickly. Then again I wouldn't risk MC applications on it without further educating myself on it also. But it's that true for all major business decisions? I DBA 3 psql dbs. I'm happy with them. I even have live backup software for them. My DBA skills arn't great, but well enough to have judged correctly on what I have.
Any other PostgreSQL DBAs have farther exp on this subject?
i would have to say that novell is pretty rock solid ... once you get it up and running it has an amazing uptime. however when you mess with it (ala make a weekly arcserve upgrade or something) thats when it tends to be flaky.
... not that unlike samba :)
it also doesnt like running out of diskspace or anywhere near out of diskspace.
with good hardware its very nice for a workgroup situation
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Get information before posting - it does runn on Windows.
In two flavors: with cygwin and a new native port that has branched recently
Slashdot is for facts not badly informed trolls
realkiwi
You could probably simply add the cygwin DLL somewhere in your path if you didn't want a whole install.
I hate to break it to you man, but if you check you'll find Windows contains an awful lot of these "library" things that pretty much the whole system AND all your third party apps use!! Those bastards.
Actually, since version 7.1 (current is 7.2) row size is unlimited. Or, rather the limits are imposed by the operating system (2GB files on ext2?).
If you're looking for a nice RDBMS for Netware, iAnywhere Solutions has SQL Anywhere, which is available for a number of platforms including Netware. I'm not exactly sure how it stacks up against PostgreSQL, but I've had a lot of success using it in the past (on Linux and Windows, admittedly).
Not that I work for iAnywhere Solutions or anything. *cough*
-j
If you do a Google search for "MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, you'll get a lot of hits. Here are a few that seem to be pretty informative (if not slightly dated):
here
here
here
here
here
here (not really a comparison, but read this article and the linked Postgres article for more info)
In my personal experience, Postgres has historically been the database more prepared for larger, more multi-threaded applications.
Obviously, there have been debates about which are faster in various different applications. To be honest, I have no hard data, nor have I stretched them either to their capacity, but as a user and casual developer, they are both fast enough for me not to notice.
What's inarguable exciting can be directly quoted from MySQL's own comparison of the two (listed above):
[B]oth products are continually evolving. We at MySQL AB and the PostgreSQL developers are both working on making our respective databases as good as possible, so we are both a serious alternative to any commercial database.
moto411.com
PostgreSQL is under BSD license... so Novell doesn't have to contribute back... but it would be nice if they would.
> I thought Postgres would have too many limitations
> to be considered a healthy alternative to Oracle.
> eg 8k row sizes. Before people flame away. It has
> been a few years since I touched postgres, so this
> may be fixed by now.
Row sizes are now unlimited. See the Postgres
Limitations info page for more info.
I once felt the same way you did about Postgres, not enough features. I don't think it was until version 7.1 that postgres got outer joins (maybe only left/right outer joins, can't remember, but it was missing something like that). But recetly it has matured quite a bit and is a very nice database in my opinion. I use it for several applications, and I like it a lot.
There are still a couple of things that are a bit clumsy with PostGres (deleting a column, for instance), but I believe it has most major features you'd expect from an rdbms. At one of my jobs we use MSSQL7 for everything, and I've worked with it a lot. In my workings with recent versions of Postgres I have not stumbled across anything that I expected to be there from my experience with other DBs that was not in Postgres.
I'd give it another look if I were you. I trust Postgres a lot more now and I'm very pleased with it. It is working really well for me.
Un-clued-in programmers will send a thousand INSERT transactions, instead of a single transaction....
...
Postgres does have the ability to have those INSERTs be part of a single transaction:
BEGIN;
INSERT (...) INTO table VALUES (...);
COMMIT;
All the inserts are now part of one transaction.
I'm unsure if one can make this the default behavior (obviating the need for the BEGIN; statement), like one can with Oracle.
I have a feeling that "un-clued-in" programmers are likely to inadvertently cause all kinds of performance (and other) problems (not limited to the database they're using). Just ask the experienced Oracle user how long it took him/her to learn how queries were specifically interpreted and how one could improve them. Heck, do half of query writers out there even know the concept behind an explain plan or explain query?
moto411.com
It's okay if you need to recover a deleted file. If you delete a folder, you've got to do quite a bit more work to get it back.
Actually, the disk space is still marked as used, but is made available when needed. (as of Netware 5.1)
A 'user' has to have administrative permissions ('S' IIRC) to the folder to undelete a file. To undelete a folder, you have to have Admin priv for the volume.
Besides, Windows has a Recycle Bin, Mac has the Trash, etc. Novell isn't all that great.
There are some cool things about Netware though. If a file has been unused for a while, it will be compressed to save disk space. After it continues to be unused, it will automatically be moved to your archive device (if you have one). So while you see a file on your Netware filesystem, it may actually be on a tape jukebox, and will be restored when you access it.
Did I mention that all this happens AUTOMATICALLY and TRANSPARENTLY?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Easy this one! From the documentation:
"If you don't issue a BEGIN command, then each individual statement has an implicit BEGIN and (if successful) COMMIT wrapped around it."
This is all you need to do and is SQL-compliant of course.
Availability:
I think there are some 3rd party products implementing various kinds of clustering/HA/failover. For 7.3 (or was it 7.4) they are working to integrate replication into the core.
Scalability:
Well, postgres uses a multi-process model, like say, apache. So in principle it can scale quite well on an SMP system. Regarding clustering, I don't know if the current work on replication includes this or not. I'd guess that when you get replication working correctly, adding clustering is not a big deal. However, the kind of clustering were you have many servers working on the same data, like the oracle9 clustering, is still quite far off, I'd say
Secure data:
postgres can do hot backups, yes. The pg_dump program outputs to standard output, so you can easily integrate it into any normal unix backup scheme with tape robots and whatnot.
Performance:
postgres uses the OS file system, raw devices are not supported. So anything that the OS file system layer supports (e.g. raid) postgres supports. There was some talk about supporting raw devices, but it was decided that it was not worth the effort.
A few years ago I worked with Oracle and it was only easy to drop a column which was at the end of a row.
If we wanted to drop a column somewhere in the middle, we also had to write a script to query the database minus the deleted column, then delete the old table and rename the new table.
Novell has other fetures i like more. The ability to install an application on ONE desktop and then load all register keys onto any computer with windows that uses that program when it loads is a pretty good feture. You install an application once and it then works without hassle on all other machines.
NDS is pretty souped up too and makes AD and LPAD look silly in comparison. It can handle silly amounts of objects in the tree without crumbling. Its enough to drive a whole e-commerse site on.
NDS exists for linux too so interoperability is not an issue. A client for linux would be just what linux needs. My dream network would be Netware on linux and linux clients. A better network to administer cant exist.
The companies that hoose novell and installs AD is in for a bigtime dissapointment because of the extreme lack of fetures in windows like filesystem limitations etc.
HTTP/1.1 400
A 'user' has to have administrative permissions ('S' IIRC) to the folder to undelete a file. To undelete a folder, you have to have Admin priv for the volume
Not in Netware 2.x/3.x. I don't know if this changed later, but I distinctly recall salvaging files from my home directory at school. I did NOT have 'S'upervisory permissions on my home dir.
Btrieve is the biggest, worst, most awful, satanic, abhorent piece of shit there ever was. And, Pervasive SQL 2000 or whatever it is called this week is still the same old worthless Btrieve piece of shit.
In fact, because they are tied to btrieve applications like Arcserve and Peachtree Accounting and a dozen other specialty apps also SUCK!!!!
Later, when I calm down, I tell you how I really feel.
If you would use an Access database for your project, then MySQL *may* be a good choice for your project. Think of MySQL as a faster, feature poor Access database. Think of Access as a slower MySQL feature rich database. Either case, both stick at concurrent (multi-user) access.
If the answer is no, then you should be looking at using PostgreSQL or a commercial database offering.
They've added memory protection since 5.x ... it's configurable too, you can choose which applications are resident in protected memory and which ones you don't. It's great for flakier NLMs that can risk your uptime if they go down.
-- Jim
Recycle bins or trash icons just don't compare for many reasons. One reason is that almost all files that are deleted with a program other than the windows exploer are really deleted and not sent to the recycle bin. You just can't rely on it. Plus least under windows, the recycle bin requires constant user interaction. My laptop often gives me a 'disk space low' balloon next to the clock and then I have to click click click and give the thing attention for 5 minutes so that it can delete the recycle bin and 'temporary internet files', or whatever...
With files in the recycle bin, the amount free diskspace that is reported by the OS does not account for the space that can be freed in the recycle bin. With novell it does.
When you do a 'delete' in the windows command line (cmd.exe), files are deleted, not sent to the recycle bin.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the compression in Novell. That is a nice feature too, but the Linux e2compress patches combined with a little perl script in the crontab can achieve the same on Linux, so it's not unique. I Didn't know about the tape jukebox. Thats seems like a realy nice feature, but the price per gigabyte of tape jukeboxes and the license cost for slots in them just make them a really expensive storage medium.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Border Manager is old and broken. The real talent left that project about 5 years ago. It has since moved here. There is a broken remnant of what BM became called ichain. Though it is not marketed as such, it uses the same code base.