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.org TLD Now Runs on PostgreSQL

johnnyb writes "The .org domain, which has long run on Oracle systems, is now being transferred to a PostgreSQL system. I guess we can now dispel the "untested in mission-critical applications" myth."

379 comments

  1. not that impressive by LinuxCumShot · · Score: 5, Funny

    .ca runs on MS-DOS running some home brew DB that is just a bunch of batch files

    --
    -- OMFG = Oh My Floatse Goatse
    1. Re:not that impressive by JonWan · · Score: 2, Funny

      Wow what do you know... they let Canadians moderate.

      +2 Funny to -1 Troll in 30 sec.

    2. Re:not that impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Parent is a joke, not a troll. /. moderators are TeH sUx0r

    3. Re:not that impressive by liquidsin · · Score: 3, Funny

      Are you sure it's a joke? I was thinking it was 'informative'.

      --
      do not read this line twice.
    4. Re:not that impressive by Space_Nerd · · Score: 1

      Are you sure that was "interesting"? i thought that was a joke.

      --
      Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
    5. Re:not that impressive by fiftyfly · · Score: 1

      well, having had the 'pleasure' of ttying to get domains transferred & what not when .ca was basically some guy at UBC I can attest the the supposition that the back end was a little meger.

      --
      "Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
    6. Re:not that impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not only that, my friend says that it is running the Quebec French version of MS-DOS as well! gotta love those dos packet drivers!

    7. Re:not that impressive by RollingThunder · · Score: 1

      Having worked with one of the new .ca registrars when the whole thing opened up (I was the firewall admin at their site, and general server admin), the insanity that CIRA required for a network config makes the parent comment far, FAR too believable.

    8. Re:not that impressive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL. That's the first time I've seen a post with "TeH sUx0r" marked "Insightful". Good work, AC.

    9. Re:not that impressive by Kashif+Shaikh · · Score: 1

      So that's why you have to fill out a long form and tell those canadian internet people why you want a .ca domain.

    10. Re:not that impressive by rtaylor · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Considering the .ca system is regularly overloaded -- to the point where OpenSRS implemented a special 'delayed transaction' system for it -- it's not that good.

      The Affilias .org (and .info) systems get the domain up and running in under 2 minutes -- which is really good considering a good chunk of that time is DNS propogation related (between masters for the domain).

      --
      Rod Taylor
    11. Re:not that impressive by wo1verin3 · · Score: 1

      thank god it's not running MS SQL after tonight.

    12. Re:not that impressive by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1

      But I imagine their home brew DB is brewed to a slightly higher strength than the American server?

      --
      -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. Oracle... by killthiskid · · Score: 5, Funny
    "No one ever got fired for selecting Oracle, so we asked ourselves, Do we take that option?" he said.

    Not true! I know someone who got fired for choosing oracle, then being unable to properly implement it.

    1. Re:Oracle... by sakeneko · · Score: 4, Informative
      "No one ever got fired for selecting Oracle, so we asked ourselves, Do we take that option?" he said.
      Not true! I know someone who got fired for choosing oracle, then being unable to properly implement it.

      Someone who worked for the State of California, perhaps? There were a bunch of people who lost their jobs over that debacle.... See here for more info.<wry grin>

    2. Re:Oracle... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      that would seem to get getting fired for gross incompitance, not for choosing Oracle.

      Sorry, man, but your friend just sounds like an idiot.

    3. Re:Oracle... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      > "No one ever got fired for selecting Oracle, so
      > we asked ourselves, Do we take that option?" he
      > said.
      >
      > Not true! I know someone who got fired for
      > choosing oracle, then being unable to properly
      > implement it.
      >
      Absolutely. I knew a guy at Microsoft who chose Oracle on Linux instead of MS SQL Server on Windows 2000.

      He was burnt at the stake for being a heretic.

      Of course the guy who used MS SQL Server on Windows 2000 didn't do much better. He wasn't fired but he went to hell.

    4. Re:Oracle... by jcr · · Score: 3, Funny

      I know someone who got fired for choosing oracle, then being unable to properly implement it.

      My standard rebuttal now when someone says "nobody every got fired for choosing (insert standard expensive mediocrity vendor here)" is: "No, they didn't get fired, they lost their job when their company folded."

      -jcr

      --
      The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
    5. Re:Oracle... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      When I was in a .com being evaluated for being purchased by a major (top-1) portal; the guy doing due-dilegence had a great oracle comment.

      We had a meeting where we went over all our cool redundancy, failover, oracle replication, etc; and at the end the guy turned to our CFO and said something like:
      "looks good. but no CFO should let oracle run a high-traffic production web server"

      his point was that while Oracle may scale well technologically, it doesn't scale as well financially.

  3. This is a great performance test by TerryAtWork · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now we get to see how PostgreSQL handles those 98 % of wasted inquiries from DNS servers that don't know .elvis is not a TLD.

    --
    It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
    1. Re:This is a great performance test by gyratedotorg · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      ...wasted inquiries from DNS servers that don't know .elvis is not a TLD.

      hey, with opennic, .elvis could very well be a tld someday. ;)

      --
      Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
    2. Re:This is a great performance test by bob@dB.org · · Score: 5, Informative
      Now we get to see how PostgreSQL handles those 98 % of wasted inquiries from DNS servers that don't know .elvis is not a TLD.

      org. is tld (top level domain).

      . (dot) is the root.

      the story on the wasted 98% was about the . (dot) root servers, not about a tld server. you (and sadly, too many others) should read rfc 1035.

      --
      Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
    3. Re:This is a great performance test by TerryAtWork · · Score: 0

      Thanks man. I'm printing the RFC out now. I get a lot of messages that don't teach me anything.

      --
      It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
    4. Re:This is a great performance test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOOOOOOOL

    5. Re:This is a great performance test by mcoko · · Score: 2, Funny

      I just wasted 98% of my brain cells trying to figure out what your parentathese and acromyns mean. Then the last 2% trying to sift through the RFC to confirm your statement.

      I have just crashed with 0% brain matter left.

      --
      www.fotoforay.com
    6. Re:This is a great performance test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      the story on the wasted 98% was about the . (dot) root servers, not about a tld server. you (and sadly, too many others) should read rfc 1035 [ietf.org].

      Yeah, it's really bad people don't read all rfc's anymore before making comments on slashdot. The quality here is degrading... hope this isn't a trend, wouldn't it be horrible to see people actually commenting on a story without having read the article... frightening prospect, I really foresee this for the future...
    7. Re:This is a great performance test by phutureboy · · Score: 1

      I just wasted 98% of my brain cells trying to figure out what your parentathese and acromyns mean. Then the last 2% trying to sift through the RFC to confirm your statement.

      I have just crashed with 0% brain matter left.


      You need to create a swap partition!

    8. Re:This is a great performance test by PCM2 · · Score: 1

      Moderation Totals: -1, No Sense of Humor

      --
      Breakfast served all day!
    9. Re:This is a great performance test by LtOcelot · · Score: 1

      ObModeratorBait: I know it's hard to resist moderating up someone who mixes unfounded insults with impressive-looking links, but please, show some restraint.

      From the referenced article:

      About 12 percent of the queries received by the root server on Oct. 4, were for nonexistent top-level domains, such as ".elvis", ".corp", and ".localhost".

      When you're looking for an unfamiliar TLD, you ask the root server. That's what the root servers point to -- TLDs.

    10. Re:This is a great performance test by LtOcelot · · Score: 1

      Ah hell. I totally misinterpreted the current article title.

      Sorry.

    11. Re:This is a great performance test by micromoog · · Score: 4, Funny
      you (and sadly, too many others) should read rfc 1035.

      Well, I would read it . . . except that it's SO completely useless and uninteresting to me.

    12. Re:This is a great performance test by ipjohnson · · Score: 1

      I think the point was that if your going to make jokes atleast get your facts straight ...

      Besides every group needs a wet blanket :)

    13. Re:This is a great performance test by Webmonger · · Score: 1

      You lose. They specifically mentioned .elvis in that story. The root servers would be queried about .elvis, since those servers must be queried to determine who's the authoritative .elvis server.

    14. Re:This is a great performance test by Lemmy+Caution · · Score: 1

      You know, .elvis resolves to a gas station on a lonely Arizona highway. Hmmmn.

    15. Re:This is a great performance test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      uh, have you been asleep for the last 4 years or something?

    16. Re:This is a great performance test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Videolan.org is unreachable...has this anything to do with
      the .org DB shifting, if yes who are we going to fire?

    17. Re:This is a great performance test by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      IHBT. IHL. IWHAND.

  4. Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by etcshadow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because they don't take context or purpose into account at all. There are things that Postress may be better for and things that Oracle certainly shines at. I mean, hell, I love MySQL, too, but I wouldn't want to use it as the backend for _my_ system. Not that the others are hollisticaly "bad", it's just that Oracle is the most appropriate for this situation.

    What's a TLD doing with a database? Making ridiculous numbers of extremely lightweight queries, and managing redundancy. That's not necessarily the same thing that everybody wants an "enterprise class" "tested" database to do for "mission critical" tasks.

    --
    :Wq
    Not an editor command: Wq
    1. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by someguyintoronto · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, this is a good question. What is the database used for? Profile information for WHOIS searches? That would make the most sense, and isn't *that* big a deal. A database to handle name resolution is a bit of overkill I think.

      And not to distract that yes it's good to see PostgreSQL getting some mainstream fame.

    2. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by primus_sucks · · Score: 1

      I love MySQL, too, but I wouldn't want to use it as the backend for _my_ system.

      Why not? MySQL seems to stack up pretty well against Oracle from everything that I've read. Slashdot seems to run pretty well on it.

    3. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by ViceClown · · Score: 1

      MySQL is good for basically storing data and returning it quickly but it really lacks alot of features that make PostgreSQL and Oraccle so similar... namely Stored Procedures, Functions, and a bunch of others. Having used Postgres, Oracle, and Mysql I can tell you that migrating from Oracle to Postgres would seem to be alot easier than from Oracle to MySQL. You simply don't get the feature set in MySQL. This isn't a poopoo on it... it just doesn't have as many features.

      --
      Have a Happy.
    4. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 2, Informative

      Short answer: MySQL simply doesn't have the feature set of either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Subselects, views, etc. ... (It does have transaction support now, fortunately.) These are features which have been on the "coming soon" list for a while, and which a lot of developers regard as essential.

      Having worked pretty extensively with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, I'll say that what keeps me going back to MySQL is speed, speed, speed. Yeah, having to implement stuff in interface code (PHP or Perl) that I really ought to be able to do in SQL is a bummer, but the queries are so much faster that it makes up for it. But it's really a matter of personal preference. PostgreSQL is a very good DBMS.

      Hoping to head off the apparently inevitable MySQL-PostgreSQL flamewar ...

      --
      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    5. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by Zeinfeld · · Score: 4, Informative
      Actually, this is a good question. What is the database used for?

      The database is a buffer between the requests comming in from the registrars and the DNS resolvers. So you get a bunch of requests comming in once a day saying stuff like 'change asm.org DNS to 10.2.3.243' and the registry has to decide what to do with them. To do that they need to have a bunch of info stating what registrar owns the account at the time and so on. And yes it is not unknown for registrars to attempt to do things they should not.

      The DNS infrastructure that is queried by you DNS server is completely separate. Every hour or so the SQL database will do a dump which will then be checked and if it passes will be sent to the production DNS infrastructure which is essentially a read only affair.

      So no, this does not mean that every DNS lookup in .org is going to result in a mySQL transaction. Nor can you say anything about whether this deployment proves mySQL is ready for primetime, at least not yet you can't. You probably want to wait to see how the zone holds up over the next few months before drawing any judgements.

      BTW the technical name for Oracle features is 'complications'.

      --
      Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
      Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
    6. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by neuroticia · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Of course it won't result in a mySQL transaction. It's running on postgreSQL. =]

      -Sara

    7. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot seems to run pretty well on it.

      You misspelled "real fucking slow." It's also down every 5 minutes. MySQL obviously can't handle the load, even in their "finely tuned" Frankenstein form.

    8. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      BTW: The technial name for Zeinfeld is "uneducated in Oracle" aka "dumbass".

    9. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      love MySQL, too, but I wouldn't want to use it as the backend for _my_ system

      Which is why they chose Postgres.

    10. Re:Well, what are/aren't they using it for? by mmclean · · Score: 1
      What's a TLD doing with a database? Making ridiculous numbers of extremely lightweight queries, and managing redundancy.


      Isn't this LDAP?
  5. slashdotted by gokubi · · Score: 4, Funny

    I hope computerworld isn't running on PostgreSQL!

    --
    I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
  6. Overkill. by grub · · Score: 5, Funny


    All they need is netcat, shell scripts and grep.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
    1. Re:Overkill. by rycamor · · Score: 2, Insightful

      ...and all the bank needs to manage your account is a paper ledger with holes punched for a nice ring-binder.

      Data *management* is every bit as important as data storage and retrieval. And don't even get me started on statistics and reporting.

    2. Re:Overkill. by rycamor · · Score: 1

      OK, ya got me... First time I've fallen for one of these (lol). It's been a long week.

    3. Re:Overkill. by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 1
      Hey!

      I still need dd

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    4. Re:Overkill. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL this is Slashdot - he prolly was dead serious about it, but now that he was modded as funny he wont admit to it

    5. Re:Overkill. by Micah · · Score: 1

      Almost. I once wrote a one line shell script that took the root zone file from a TLD (which my company had access to) and outputted a sorted list of all registered domains in that TLD. It was fun. :)

    6. Re:Overkill. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Christianity is stupid. Communism is good!

  7. Poor slashdot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well...we might not be able to access slashdot.org anymore! :)

  8. Wasn't Oracle, actually by kschendel · · Score: 5, Informative

    Verisign runs the shared registry with Oracle, but the registrar-specific data was and still is stored using Ingres.

    1. Re:Wasn't Oracle, actually by rycamor · · Score: 1

      If so, that's interesting, when you realize that Ingres is the predecessor to Postgres, which later became the PostgreSQL project. Postgres originally used the (theoretically more relational) QUEL language of Ingres, but with SQL being the de facto standard, they decided to change to PostgreSQL.

    2. Re:Wasn't Oracle, actually by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      we're talking about the .org REGISTRY, which is equivilant to the shared registry (srs), not nsi-registrar. .CC runs both registry and registrar on Mysql 3.x.

    3. Re:Wasn't Oracle, actually by ipjohnson · · Score: 1

      Did ingress ever use QUEL because I believe they are now SQL?

    4. Re:Wasn't Oracle, actually by rycamor · · Score: 1

      AFAIK, QUEL was originally developed specifically for Ingres, and was considered a better implementation of a relational query language than SQL, by such people as Codd, Date, et al.

      (Short discussion on the history of Ingres here, here, and here)

    5. Re:Wasn't Oracle, actually by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      According to a guy from NetSol at the 1998 ISPF in Atlanta, they used PERL scripts to manipulate the data (e.g. process received e-mail forms and send-out e-mail invoices and automated responses). All of the data was stored in Microsoft Access. The paper invoices were generated directly from Access. I don't know how they accessed the Access from the PERL programs. He said many times there's trouble (like yesterday when the morning root server update didn't happen until 11:15 AM rather than the promised 6:00 AM), it's because they're having trouble with Access. I'd like to hear more about this, because I haven't seen Access mentioned anywhere else wrt NetSol. I accepted it as fact, because one of the founders of NetSol said it and not a one, out of the about 40 ISP employees and owners, said anything to disagree with it.

  9. Another victory for open source by Kethinov · · Score: 0, Informative

    Open source software is becoming increasingly popular lately. A few years ago, many people laughed at the concept and thought that open source = security risk. Those who supported it have proven otherwise. Closed source programs end up having more bugs and security holes in the long run because open source programs get debugged by thousands of users.

    .Org is just one shining example of how large organizations are beginning to lean toward open source, not necessarily in support of open source ideals, but because it's simply better quality.

    --
    You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    1. Re:Another victory for open source by sxe_p06 · · Score: 0

      .Org is just one shining example of how large organizations are beginning to lean toward open source, not necessarily in support of open source ideals, but because it's simply better quality.

      So, .NET would be just one shining example of what?

      --
      -- p06 "On religious wars: They're essentially wars over whoo's imaginary friend is better"
    2. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You are a stupid karma whore.

      > open source programs get debugged by thousands of users

      closed source software gets debugged before shipping

      If i had mod points you'd get a '-1 RMS's Bitch'

    3. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *cough*hypocrite*cough*

    4. Re:Another victory for open source by The+Bungi · · Score: 0, Flamebait
      but because it's simply better quality.

      I'll ignore the obvious karma whoring that is apparently working for you today - but are you saying that Postgres is a better quality database than Oracle?

    5. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I never use open source software in my life, it's because I dont want karma-whoring faggots like you patting me on the back or making stupid assumptions like 'Closed source programs end up having more bugs and security holes in the long run'.

    6. Re:Another victory for open source by Kethinov · · Score: 0, Troll

      wtf? I don't even know how the karma system on slashdot works. I just posted my opinion. Sheesh.

      --
      You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
    7. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      *cough*Kethinov (636034)*cough*

      HAHAHAHAHZAHAAA!
      Skill Karma whoring failed!
      HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

    8. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > wtf? I don't even know how the karma system on slashdot works. I just posted my opinion. Sheesh

      No really?

      But you obviously dont know about the history of posts every user has

      Heres one of your previous attempts to karma whore that failed miserably.

      So you're not a whore but rather a whoreling since you still have to suck a lot of dick to become a master in that discipline.

      How about singing God Bless RMS?

    9. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ROTFLMAO!

      Just noticed - I was the one that modded you as redundant on your prev attemp.

      I've got a pornographic memory - I remember all whores.

    10. Re:Another victory for open source by glwtta · · Score: 2, Interesting
      but are you saying that Postgres is a better quality database than Oracle?

      "Quality" is a very nebulous term. There are things that postgres does better than Oracle. Often it's when Oracly is just overkill (usually by a long shot) and postgres is just easier to set up and manage. Also has neat features like regular expressions.

      The only reason I prefer Oracle to postgres (as a developer) for large(er) projects is that pgAdminII is just no SQL Navigator.

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    11. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And another karma whoring post by you:

      > Mozilla is coming along nicely. I've recommended it as an alternative to IE to all my friends and family. No popups and tabbed browing has me hooked :)
      <b> done by me

      browing? I guess you meant brown nosing has you hooked

    12. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your comment is rated: 20% Troll, 20% Redundant, 30% Interesting

      No wonder nobody makes money with OS if they can't even add numbers :p

    13. Re:Another victory for open source by SoftwareJanitor · · Score: 1

      closed source software gets debugged before shipping

      Sometimes, maybe. But I've certainly seen plenty of shipping closed source packages that were buggier than a south Florida swamp in July... So it isn't always true.

    14. Re:Another victory for open source by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Another victory for open source (Score:0)
      by Kethinov (636034) on 11:57 24 January 2003 (#5152901)

      Moderations: 20% Troll, 20% Redundant, 20% Interesting

      Interesting. The post was on... 'sucess' for open source software. Slashcode is OSS. I give open source a giant 120% WRONG

    15. Re:Another victory for open source by deaddrunk · · Score: 1

      closed source software gets debugged before shipping

      Hahahahahahahahahahahaha that's a good one.

      --
      Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
  10. Um by TekReggard · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "Mohan said the decision to award the contract to a vendor deploying PostgreSQL vindicates the database as a reliable, stable management system."

    No, it simply means that its going to be tested in a larger environment and if it does well then they get to party and say "woohoo it worked!" and if it flops they're all gonna feel really stupid. It doesnt mean its stable at all. The common practice of paraphrasing "LOOK!! Someone is using our product so it MUST work perfectly." is actually quite disturbing.

    1. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well, did you read the article? They already have tested it to a degree with the .INFO TLD. Naturally, if it worked at that level, it's time to kick it up a notch. It DOES work perfectly for what they've already done. Call it building trust.

    2. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      its open source - they have to make a fuss about it when finally some real business tries to use it

      if it was any good it wouldnt be free

      lol

    3. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you get a job just ask me for advice on purchasing decisions.

    4. Re:Um by Dan+Ost · · Score: 1

      I disagree with your interpretation.

      The vindication here is that a third party,
      allied to neither party (Oracle or PostgreSQL)
      decided that, at least for this application,
      PostgreSQL was more suitable than Oracle.

      Given the reputation of Oracle, this is a big win
      for the supporters of PostgreSQL.

      The assumption here is that the decision was made
      by people who tested both systems against the
      job requirements. It doesn't prove that the
      software is perfect, but that it performed solid
      enough that these people were willing to recommend
      it for the job.

      --

      *sigh* back to work...
    5. Re:Um by waveclaw · · Score: 1
      The common practice of paraphrasing "LOOK!! Someone is using our product so it MUST work perfectly." is actually quite disturbing.

      You must deal with management. A lot of 'product evalutations' by the clueless or uninitiated (into engineering or science thinking) tend to devolve into 6th grade 'look-at-that' with much finger pointing and jumping up-and-down. Its fun to see who gets the most buzzwords per evaluation or jumps so much they bust a button on their Armani.

      However, one must remember that ususaly a tiny portion of the current employees that can use whatever they pick. These will probably become the only employees left once they start counting headcount. After all, the money for the 'project' has to come from somebody's buget.

      --

      "You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
    6. Re:Um by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 1


      I don't know how process works where you work, TekReggard, but by the time most of us go live with a project, the testing period is over. If you wait until the world starts hammering on the service to see how well it can hold up, you've waited too long and shouldn't be surprised if/when it does fail.

      True, no testing environment will ever duplicate real world conditions exactly, but since this project ended up going live it's safe to assume that PostgreSQL passed the tests with flying colors. While failure is still a possibility, it seems unlikely.

    7. Re:Um by NineNine · · Score: 1

      I own both a pneumatic nail gun and a hammer. I chose the hammer to hang a picture in my house. In no way does it mean that the nail gun is any less of a good tool. In no way does it mean that the hammer is effective as the nail gun in all situations.

    8. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why should I talk to myself if I can just toss a coin?

      All these AC voices inside my head!

      This was a big fat troll bait and you've bitten :)

    9. Re:Um by cyb97 · · Score: 1
      Not everybody is familiar with the term "overkill"...

    10. Re:Um by benking · · Score: 1

      Come on !! These guys are caring the weight of the 5th largest domain on the internet. You don't think they load tested this product before selecting it ? Not to mention it is already being used for the .info domain. I am sure the people at Postgre already know how good a product they have made. Now other people will know to ... and they won't have to play 2nd fiddle MySQL either.

    11. Re:Um by Dan+Ost · · Score: 1

      I didn't claim that PostgreSQL was more appropriate
      than Oracle for all situations. I said that for
      this particular application, someone decided that
      PostgreSQL was the better choice.

      I don't know what criteria they used, but assuming
      they made a rational decision, PostgreSQL met
      those criteria at least as good as Oracle did.

      --

      *sigh* back to work...
    12. Re:Um by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I don't quite know what you mean, but after I bought a nail gun I rarely use a hammer any more.

  11. Nice. But who is supporting it? by Kenneth+Stephen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Please, please, please tell me that there is some commercial entity that they have contracted to for support. I really dont want my domain to be unreachable because they do their own support and are debating about which fix is the "right thing to do" so that upstream accepts it.

    --

    There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.

    1. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by mph · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Why do you assume that an outside, commercial entity would be more competent than somebody on their own staff? If they need a PostgreSQL expert, why would it be better to pay a "commercial entity" to provide them with an expert, rather than just hire the expert?

      I'm not saying that's what they did; of course it would depend on whether they have enough work to hire the expert, for example. But I don't understand the reasoning that says "there's no way that we can hire competent staff, but surely if we pay another company enough, they'll have competent staff."

    2. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by questionlp · · Score: 2, Informative

      Well, Red Hat is using PostgreSQL for their Red Hat Database package and presumably would provide support for it. You can also find support partners for PGSQL at http://www.pgsql.com/partnerlinks/.

    3. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by Kenneth+Stephen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Competency isnt the issue here. I am assuming that whoever the actual developer of the fix is, that they will be extremely competent in fixing the problem. With an external entity, contractual terms of delivery will twist their arms into fixing severity 1 problems with the urgency that they deserve regardless of whether the fix is the best possible coding / architectural solution for the overall Postgres project. With an internal entity, the pressure will be less on them because if management threatens to "chop the head off" because of trying to do the "right thing" instead of just fixing the problem, they will have to stop and consider that they are damaging their own organization. It is always easier for management to be brutal with external entities rather than one of their own.

      --

      There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.

    4. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by wfrp01 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      So you can "chop the head off" the consultant, because they're less important than internal employees. Therefore they are more valuable. Yeah, whatever.

      I have to say, I'm pretty suspicious of any management theory which is predicated on the notion that your best option is the one that allows you treat people the shittiest. And god forbid anyone would do the "right thing".

      Just exactly why do you think an internal employees idea of what constitutes the "right thing" would be inconsistent with managment's anyway? If indeed you find yourself dealing with employees who let the world collapse around them while they fritter away their time on trivia, they should, in fact, have their heads chopped off. But personally, I know precious few people who would behave in such a manner.

      --

      --Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
    5. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by rycamor · · Score: 1

      Go to pgsql.com. They have commercial support, just like any regular company. In fact, at the higher levels of support, they even throw in a commercial replication/distributed-querying system. This is really the best of both worlds. You get the full source of the application for your own review, and you get to call an expert anytime you like.

    6. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by Sxooter · · Score: 1

      Absolutely. The thing is, if you have a contract that says you can truly screw over your database support provider, then they're actually less motivated to be straight forward with you. They'll hide problems from you hoping they don't come up instead of warning you ahead of time and taking care of them before they're trouble.

      I have NEVER had to debate whether to upgrade within a major version (i.e. 7.2.0 to 7.2.1 to 7.2.2 and on) They have always worked, this is not Microsoft SQL, and I've upgraded EVERY single time there's been an update since 6.5.2 came out in 1999.

      Postgresql is the LEAST of my worries as a sysadmin. I run backups and vacuums every night and the box has never gone down unscheduled in three years running postgresql. Yes, it is that good.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
    7. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by mmclean · · Score: 1
      With an external entity, contractual terms of delivery will twist their arms into fixing severity 1 problems with the urgency that they deserve regardless of whether the fix is the best possible coding / architectural solution for the overall Postgres project.


      And this is bad how?
    8. Re:Nice. But who is supporting it? by JohnnyBigodes · · Score: 1


      -------And god forbid anyone would do the "right thing"

      Everyone knows that in a manager/marketer's head, "the right thing" is the one that immediately solves their problem and brings in immediate profit/less expense.

      Of course, some weeks/months later, they may be regretting their decisions, but hey, they're the ones who know the "right thing" to do...

  12. How fitting... by exhilaration · · Score: 2, Redundant
    That the .org TLD, where one will find the vast majority of open source projects, is using open source software for mission-critical tasks.

    Today is a good day for open source and free software!

  13. PostgreSQL? Internally, maybe... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Afilias uses UltraDNS for their TLD servers... and UltraDNS runs Oracle. But what the hell, just because Computerworld says it and Slashdot posts it, it MUST be true!

  14. Not a surprise... by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had the misfortune of dealing with oracle tech support team once and I can say I am not surprised the ".org" domain has shifted to PG.

    The DB was locking up when trying to retrieve data from a large table (>10 M rows) using a very complex query.The oracle guys kept suggesting that reduce the size of the table.

    Now seriously is that a valid option ? Hey man , I have a million bucks in my acct. and i can't withdraw from the ATM ??
    Just delete some of it and then try again ?
    Or the most common answer from Oracle tech team is "we know its a problem but we will not fix it in this release. Just buy the next version if you want it fixed ?

    --
    for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
    1. Re:Not a surprise... by BigGerman · · Score: 2, Informative

      Just did another Oracle TAR (telephone assistance request) via their Metalink site.
      In 5 minutes, there was real person working on it.
      In 20 minutes, he explained the behaviour(oracle bug) and suggested the workaround.

      Disclaimer: I do not work for them, do not rely on income from DBA work and do prefer Postgres for my own projects

    2. Re:Not a surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The way you express yourself, I assume that the workaround did not involve deleting a few million records ;-)

    3. Re:Not a surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      duh
      I don't think that was the point he was trying to make. Look up the word 'analagy', preferably without stopping at 'anal'.

    4. Re:Not a surprise... by fitten · · Score: 1

      The DB was locking up when trying to retrieve data from a large table (>10 M rows) using a very complex query

      Maybe look at the query(ies) and optimize them or at least make sure they are optimized before freaking out. Do things like check to see if the right indices are being used.

      I spent about 4 months optimizing queries for a product I worked on once. The best job was taking a set of queries that routinely took 24+ hours of execution (these were unrealistic performance for the goal of our product) and optimized them to execute in ~1 hour on the same data set.

      (The Oracle optimizer isn't very good, IMO. For example, an Index on TABLE(A,B) isn't used if you SELECT * FROM TABLE WHERE B=X AND A=Y even though that is kind of an obvious optimization.)

    5. Re:Not a surprise... by unDiWahn · · Score: 1

      You're joking, right? ...

      You might want to look up 'metaphor' in the dictionary.

    6. Re:Not a surprise... by tzanger · · Score: 2, Funny

      Just did another Oracle TAR (telephone assistance request) via their Metalink site.

      Ya know, PostgreSQL has multiple levels of support as well... I believe you would have as good response times with them, especially at their Platinum level of support.

    7. Re:Not a surprise... by eric2hill · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This isn't an excuse, just an explanation:

      Oracle will use the index Table(A,B) to locate all A where A=Y, then scan through those rows for B=X. It will not use the full index like you've said. If you want to use the full index, you either need to specify A=Y before B=X, or use two separate indexes Table(A) and Table(B) which can be bitmap-joined to produce the given result set.

      You're right, Oracle should optimize the where clause to use composite indexes, but Oracle usually recommends not using ANY composite indexes in favor of bitmap-joined indexes. Oracle will not use multiple composite indexes on a single table.

      --
      LOAD "SIG",8,1
      LOADING...
      READY.
      RUN
    8. Re:Not a surprise... by norton_I · · Score: 1

      Hm. I filed a TAR a couple of years ago for a trivial bug which I had already completely diagnosed, related to a fixed bug in an earlier version of oracle, and posted the name of the function that needed to be altered, and 4 months later (when I left the company I was working for), they had not fixed it.

      This was on the Linux version of 8.1.5 we used for development, and we were deployed on HP-UX, so it wasn't a huge issue, especially since I managed to patch it myself within a few days of reporting the bug, but I really expected better of them.

    9. Re:Not a surprise... by frodo+from+middle+ea · · Score: 1
      Well we did all that.

      There wasn't one single v$ view that we left uninspected. We uesd lots of query analysis tools,the queries were highly optimized, so was the DB schema. The tablespaces, the rollback segments etc were configured optimally

      But you have to realise the fact that, with a Data mining DB the no. of rows just pile up over the years and its not even allowed to delete the data.

      I belive no matter what optimization you use, maintaining high volume data is a whole different ball game.

      --
      for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
    10. Re:Not a surprise... by Chazmyrr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You are retrieving data from a 10 million row table using a very complex query and you are having performance problems? Who would have thought that?

      Normally I get paid a lot of money to solve problems like this but I'll give you a little guidance for free since you didn't like Oracle's answer.

      1) Maybe you should think about optimizing your query a bit. Running complex queries against 10+ rows can be problematic even when the RDMS has a good optimizer. Is there a less complex way to accomplish the same thing? If not, you may have to give the optimizer hints. Can you use an index to pull a smaller dataset into a working table where you do your complex operations?

      2) Profile your system to determine where the bottleneck is to be found. Is it CPU bound or IO bound. If it's IO bound, would more memory help? Can your tablespace be spread across more disks? Would a beefier system be appropriate? Cost Effective?

      This is why you hire qualified developers and administrators. I'm not surprised the tech team gave you that answer. You call the tech team when there is a real problem with the software. If you were paying Oracle to develop the database for you, you might have a case. But then, if that were true, you wouldn't have called tech support, would you?

    11. Re:Not a surprise... by fitten · · Score: 1

      Yup, but you'd almost *have* to think that the optimizer could figure out what we meant by that query but it didn't.

      Yes, a part of the optimizations I did were simply making sure that the queries used the indices that were actually there (where many times the queries didn't) and to actually make sure there were indices there for the common queries that we had.

    12. Re:Not a surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm going to agree with some of the other subthreads here -- you're selling Oracle support short.

      From my experience over the last few years with Oracle is this -- you get what you pay for.

      Switching from a mainframe based solution (IDMS -- oh the humanity) to Sun/Oracle has been quite a massive transition, but worth every penny.

    13. Re:Not a surprise... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      He didn't say it was slow, he said it was outright locking up. That just plain shouldn't happen.

    14. Re:Not a surprise... by Sxooter · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But you'll notice he said the database was "locking up". No matter how inefficient your query, or whatnot, you shouldn't be able to lock up a database with a select query. Period. And reducing the amount of data is never the answer.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
    15. Re:Not a surprise... by MmmmAqua · · Score: 3, Informative

      Or the most common answer from Oracle tech team is "we know its a problem but we will not fix it in this release. Just buy the next version if you want it fixed ?

      Actually, they suggest you upgrade to the newest version, not that you buy anything new. Licenses purchased from Oracle are for a product family for a length of time determined by the license. For example: if you bought a four-year single cpu Enterprise Edition license two years ago when 8i was the current release, you have the right to use 9i, and 10i when it appears, until the end of your license term.

      ...according to my Oracle sales rep.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    16. Re:Not a surprise... by ChannelX · · Score: 1

      Considering you left out a lot of information about your particular problem I don't consider their response as ridiculous as you do. I've never had any issues with Oracle's DB tech support. In fact they've saved my ass a few times. Very well trained people unlike some of the people in their other divisions (or other companies for that matter). Oracle DB tech support is by far the finest I've ever dealt with.

      --
      My blog: http://jkratz.dyndns.org/~jason/blog/
    17. Re:Not a surprise... by FingerBoneHoop · · Score: 1

      Just as someone else pointed out on slashdot a few weeks ago: selling bugged software is very profitable - you sell the support and the updates.

    18. Re:Not a surprise... by jcoy42 · · Score: 1

      yeah, I was.. I didn't figure it would go over well.. :)

      --
      Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
    19. Re:Not a surprise... by OrenWolf · · Score: 2, Informative

      My god.

      Go crawl up your database and hide in a cell.

      Firstly, reducing the amount of data is crap. What if you have 10 million records? Should the answer from *tech support* be "well, don't!"?? That's what you advocate.

      Oracle dropped the ball here. First, because the database *crashed* on the query. If you're telling me that *any* query I run should be able to outright *crash* the database then go work for Microsoft on MS-SQL. Worst case, the database should thrash incessantly (and accept a kill) or consume too much RAM and kill itself off, but certainly not HANG. I can't believe you suggest that's the fault of the person running the query and not the developer.

      But secondly, and most importantly, Oracle should definately offer tips on what to do. I mean, regardless of the situation, the thing ran, and *died*. Not slow. Not exceeding resources. Died. If it's a bug, fine. Then you offer a bloody workaround, *especially* if you have no intention of fixing the bug!

      I mean since when is *crashing* an app not a reason to call tech support? Is it because you run Windows and are *used* to the tech support response of "Reboot, try again"??

      Geez.

    20. Re:Not a surprise... by bwt · · Score: 1

      When you say the DB was "locking up" what do you mean? Are you saying that the Oracle background processes were hanging/crashing and all the sessions were dieing or are you saying that your session simply didn't come back (presumably because it was calculating).

      In neither case does it seem reasonable (or believable, I have to say) that oracle support would tell you to reduce the size of your table. First of all, if the error is the latter kind (a simple case of computationally intractable execution plan for SQL) they wouldn't tell you anything at all because you are asking them for application development support (namely tuning). They would point you to the Oracle manuals on SQL tuning.

      Oracle support is for the former kind of error, in which case you should have a specific oracle error that you are getting, like ORA-00600. If you have an enterprise account, then you can literally get an engineer on the phone with you at 4AM on Christmas Eve who will do whatever it takes to get you back online.

      A "Priority 1 Down" TAR requires you to respond back to them at least once an hour with results of things they tell you to try. They will want you to set diagnostic events and take trace files and run STATSPACK and so forth. If you are serious about getting your problem solved they will literally make patches for you in real time if your crash is due to a bug in their code.

    21. Re:Not a surprise... by skSlashDot · · Score: 1

      We use sybase, not Oracle... but any "simple" version upgrade is not taken lightly. With 10K tables, some of which have more than 1000K rows, many of which are mission critical, there are no "easy" upgrades for us. Even moving to a new piece of hardware takes several months of testing.

    22. Re:Not a surprise... by jschrod · · Score: 1
      Than you have a bad contract.

      I'm in Germany, and had Oracle engineers flown in from the US, when the local SEs couldn't fix it in 8 hours.

      As always, you get what you pay for. If it costs you 6- or 7-digit numbers per hour when your RDBMS is down, then spent a lot of money and use Oracle. That's where Oracle is exceptional.

      If it's not as important (i.e., when you loose only a few thousand dollars per hour), ask in some Oracle newsgroup, or use DB2. If your database isn't mission-critical at all, use PostgreSQL. If you actually don't need a database but want SQL queries, use MySQL.

      --

      Joachim

      People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]

    23. Re:Not a surprise... by Chazmyrr · · Score: 1

      He didn't say the database crashed. He said the database locked up. When someone tells me their database locked up because they are doing complex query on 10 million rows, and Oracle tech support tells them to take a hike, this suggests several possibilities to me.

      1) He's running this on a box that can't handle the load.
      2) He can't write a decent SQL statement.
      3) He doesn't understand how to optimize.
      4) He isn't qualified to do database design and needs to hire a consultant.
      5) Any or All of the above.

      We run terabyte data warehouses on Oracle. Billions of rows. We don't have issues like this guy. We run OLTP databases with 20k simultaneous users on Oracle. We don't have issues like this guy. Think about it. If Oracle can't handle 10 million rows, large corporations wouldn't use it.

      If he isn't the developer, why is he allowed to run an arbitrary query against an Oracle database? If it's something he's got on his desktop, fine. But you never, ever, ever let some smuck run an arbitrary query against your production database. Because no matter how badly it's written, no matter how much cpu time it hogs from other applications, no matter how much it impacts all of the other users, the database does exactly what the query told it to do. If you need to provide some adhoc functionality that also protects the database from bad queries, that's where middleware enters the picture.

  15. I hope this isn't the reason for this email by f00l · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope this isn't the reason why they sent me an email yesterday morning with a list of over 86,000 valid contact email addresses. Here's an article about it

    1. Re:I hope this isn't the reason for this email by Styx · · Score: 1

      That was Verisign, not pir.org

      --
      /Styx
    2. Re:I hope this isn't the reason for this email by rtaylor · · Score: 1

      Heh.. Those came from Network Solutions (the old registrar of .org) -- the old Oracle based solution.

      Mind you, NSI hasn't been known for writing robust code, so I'd be willing to bet databases weren't involved in causing the issue.

      --
      Rod Taylor
  16. The point by Synn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think the issue is that PostgreSQL will crunch data as well as Oracle. It's just that PostgreSQL has always had an undeserved reputation as "the database to use when you can't afford a REAL database", when actually it's a very robust and secure system that can compete quite well with commercial systems.

    I'd really like to see some serious tests done with PostgreSQL. Database systems, especially Oracle, can be an expensive part of a datacenter. Considering that with Linux/PostgreSQL your only cost is hardware/support, it may very well scale more cost effectively than Oracle.

    There's currently way too much marketing and FUD to get a real idea how these systems compare though.

    1. Re:The point by etcshadow · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, that's exactly my point. I'm not saying "I don't trust PostgresSQL", I'm just saying that this doesn't really prove anything on its own.

      Good for them. Hell, great for them. I'll admit that I really like Oracle, but it's not the one and only universal hammer.

      The truth is that it is very difficult to really express what any particular DBMS is good at / bad at /worth in $$$. Too much of the time, the people who actually make purchasing and deployment decisions on database platforms don't really understand the issues. I think that is a large part of why such comparisons aren't very prevelant: that is, the people who could understand them are not the ones who would be using them, so why bother? Just publish FUD, and claim that you either innovate or are Unbreakable. :-)

      --
      :Wq
      Not an editor command: Wq
    2. Re:The point by ortholattice · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I'd really like to see some serious tests done with PostgreSQL.

      I love PostgreSQL, have used it in a small (million-record) transactional application with great success, and am pleased to see the implied advocacy of having .org run on it. Nonetheless 2.4 million records is hardly enterprise-level stress. I would really like to see some serious benchmarks against Oracle. My tests on a small PC-based Linux server last year showed that pg beat Oracle mainly because the bloat of Oracle caused excessive thrashing, but on a large mainframe-type application - billion-record type stuff - I simply have no idea. A couple of years ago some benchmarks were published on the web but got quickly taken down by Oracle under threat of lawsuit - their license doesn't allow publication of benchmarks - and I never got to see them. I think this is wrong. Perhaps the recent ruling against EDA benchmark restrictions will open a door towards Oracle benchmarks?

    3. Re:The point by einer · · Score: 1

      Postgres is great. I love it and advocate its use at work, for all of the projects that don't require replication. Lack of replication is definately holding it back. There are some third party solutions, but the only real way to get replication under postgres is to pay 10 grand and get the PostgreSQL Enterprise Replication Server. Still cheaper than Oracle I guess.

    4. Re:The point by Malcontent · · Score: 1

      Have you noticed how the sourceforge search engine is just about useless since they migrated to DB/2? When it was postgres it worked now it's pretty rare when you get search results, instead you get the "too busy" message.

      --

      War is necrophilia.

    5. Re:The point by einhverfr · · Score: 1

      PostgreSQL Inc offers proprietary replication solutions and also look at http://pgreplication.sourceforgen.net

      --

      LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
    6. Re:The point by shades66 · · Score: 1

      their license doesn't allow publication of benchmarks

      What? You would of thought they would want this to show how good their software is. Or do they not show this?!?!

      Mark

      --
      ---- There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't
  17. Great idea... by Kenja · · Score: 4, Funny

    If it breaks they can just go to postgresql.org to get updates and.... oh wait.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
    1. Re:Great idea... by mustangdavis · · Score: 0, Flamebait
      If it breaks they can just go to postgresql.org to get updates and....


      ... kick them selves for wasting the bandwidth to download those updates, then point their browser to MySQL.com and prepare to upgrade to MySQL while they download the source code!

    2. Re:Great idea... by madprof · · Score: 1

      Nothing like those partisan feelings to really contribute to a ripping debate!
      They just used the system that fitted them best. You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.

    3. Re:Great idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The fact that slashdot runs MySql is the biggest indictment of MySql there is. The site is down every 5 minutes (because their database is broken), it seems, and is as slow as hell.

    4. Re:Great idea... by sharkey · · Score: 5, Funny

      You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.

      You misspelled "real fucking slow".

      --

      --
      "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
    5. Re:Great idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yes, but this discussion is about RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS, not singleuser frontends to flat files.

    6. Re:Great idea... by Sxooter · · Score: 1

      I'm not getting it. It's not like Postgresql is some tired old code somebody made a long time ago and nobody maintains or updates. The guys that make Postgresql work are pros and they're good at what they do.

      The times between updates has been fairly short, and I have seen many people get patches from the hackers when somebody's SQL wasn't working right.

      I started using Postgresql in 1999 at about version 6.5.1. The release schedule is :

      version | release_date | time_to_next

      6.5.0 | 1999-06-09 | 36
      6.5.1 | 1999-07-15 | 62
      6.5.2 | 1999-09-15 | 28
      6.5.3 | 1999-10-13 | 208
      7.0.0 | 2000-05-08 | 24
      7.0.1 | 2000-06-01 | 4
      7.0.2 | 2000-06-05 | 159
      7.0.3 | 2000-11-11 | 143
      7.1.0 | 2001-04-03 | 32
      7.1.1 | 2001-05-05 | 6
      7.1.2 | 2001-05-11 | 96
      7.1.3 | 2001-08-15 | 173
      7.2.0 | 2002-02-04 | 45
      7.2.1 | 2002-03-21 | 155
      7.2.2 | 2002-08-23 | 39
      7.2.3 | 2002-10-01 | 57
      7.3.0 | 2002-11-27 | 25
      7.3.1 | 2002-12-22 |

      Updates are fast and correct, and while the developers won't always do whatever a user wants, they are quite approachable, and genuinely nice folks.

      I would say the support I get from the postgresql mailing lists is better than any support I've ever had before, period. And so would a lot of other postgresql users.

      PS I HATE THE F**KING LAMNESS FILTER.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
    7. Re:Great idea... by derF024 · · Score: 1

      You'll note Slashdot uses MySQL and is very happy.

      You misspelled "real fucking slow".


      erm.. which slashdot are you using?

      this article with all it's comments (242K of HTML alone) loads in less than 1 second on mozilla. i'm logged in and i have a bunch of custom content in slashboxes on the right hand side. in addition, all my foes + friends are properly marked throughout the page. I'm fairly sure that the 1/2 second delay is mozilla trying to render the HTML with all the messy nested tables and crap, not slashdot being slow in sending it.

      as a point of refrence, wget downloads the same page (with me logged in) at over 550K/sec. less than 1/2 a second.

      you can complain about the crappy editorial comments, the duplicate stories, the slashtrolls or the fact that taco can't spell, but saying that slashdot is slow is just stupid.

      as for oracle, my school uses an oracle app called "banner" for student registration, grades and financial information. it's running on several monster dedicated AIX machines. Around registration time the system slows to a crawl, and often dies, with less than 1000 students pounding on it!

    8. Re:Great idea... by sharkey · · Score: 3, Funny

      erm.. which slashdot are you using?

      Try reading during the day. When Slashdot takes 5-10 minutes to respond to a connection request, I'd say that's pretty damn slow. It's quite a bit faster at night. The daily slow-down is more an indictment of Taco's implementation than anything else, I suppose. Since Taco implemented this new interation of Slashdot Math (20+30+30=100), the site's been nearly unreadable during the US day.

      --

      --
      "Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
    9. Re:Great idea... by tshak · · Score: 3, Informative

      I'll second that. I'm not proud of it but I hit /. at least 3 times a day. The response can be horrible sometimes. Many times, I get "server not found" errors or MySql errors (aka, "static page only whole MySql DB server is getting rebuilt/rebooted"). Of all the sites I frequent (FiringSquad, Tomshardware, Anandtech, etc.) this site as the worst performance. True, it does have the least amount of static comment (a huge threading system, but the other sites have small but active forums too). Still, Anandtech runs fricken Cold Fusion on Windows of all things and it runs better!

      --

      There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
    10. Re:Great idea... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What is ZDNet on then? Using both at the same time, Slashdot is vastly quicker.

    11. Re:Great idea... by Fjord · · Score: 1

      Slash caches the front page and the article pages in different configurations and regens them every so often (depnds on settings), so reading these pages basically pulling static data that doesn't hit the DB (except, perhaps to put the advertisments up, I'm not sure). The "real fucking slow" part comes in where you hit "reply to this" or a link to a comment that isn't blown up on the first page, and then wait, if in fact it comes up at all..

      --
      -no broken link
    12. Re:Great idea... by madprof · · Score: 1

      So MySQL isn't an RDBMS then?
      I love PostgreSQL and use it in preference to MySQL all the time.
      But you're talking shit.

  18. dot org pricing by w4rh0g · · Score: 0

    First off, hats off to Postgre for showing the world that you don't need a large monster like Oracle to run your databases. Now if only mySQL had some of the same features...

    My question is, will this affect the pricing of .org names since they don't have to try to re-coup the costs of a $40,000 database?

  19. Why not Perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Why not just use Perl? It's the perfect tool for the job, especially if you want to use 100% of your CPU all the time.

    1. Re:Why not Perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I agree whole-heartedly. Any computer guy with half a wit knows that everything else is inferior to Perl. It's the tool that's good at everything. Just ask Slashdot.

    2. Re:Why not Perl? by axxackall · · Score: 1

      You mistake Perl with Java.

      --

      Less is more !
    3. Re:Why not Perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Perl uses 100% CPU, Java uses 100% RAM.

      Combine them both, and you will bring any system to its knees.

    4. Re:Why not Perl? by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      compiled COBOL with ISAM will kick the butt of any modern sissy SQL DBMS, and it's then only natural they should use RPG-II for reporting. Will only take just a wee bit more typing to code everything, but you just can't get any more feeling of accomplishment than seeing your source code is larger than your compiled executable.

    5. Re:Why not Perl? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > Why not just use Perl? It's the perfect
      > tool for the job, especially if you want
      > to use 100% of your CPU all the time.

      I know! I bet they didn't consider XML as a solution, either.

      - a.c.

  20. Ummmm.... by Grip3n · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...for some reason I can't resolve postgresql.org anymore...

    --
    To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
  21. Postgres in mission critical apps by j_kenpo · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, we ran Postgres as our primary database for a Managed Network System Security,a nd the postgres database stored all alerts coming in from all our sensors, which included a .EDU that had qutie a bit of traffic going through it (our own implemented honeypot). The only issue we ran into was with disk space with packet logging, which was unrelated to the Postgres Database. We would get any number of hits per data into the database (sometimes over a million in a weeks time). Ive come to prefer Postgres over MySQL, although Id still take Oracle over each if I could afford the license.

  22. pfffttt.. by destiney · · Score: 0, Troll


    So what, it's still slow as hell.

    MySQL rulez!

    1. Re:pfffttt.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      sheeeshhh..

      Try using the InnoDB... Half the features of PostgreSQL and already running SLOWER!

    2. Re:pfffttt.. by Graelin · · Score: 2, Funny

      Posts like this remind me of WHY my skills in database and application design are in such high demand....

      So what, it's still slow as hell.

      MySQL rulez!


      Yes yes, please keep thinking that Troll. I'm paid very well to clean up your messes.

    3. Re:pfffttt.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This message board has more arrogance than a MENSA meeting..

  23. Re:first post! by Ponty · · Score: 1, Funny

    You wouldn't have gotten FP, but I couldn't resolve slashdot.org. Goddammed hippie databases being used for mission criticial applications.

  24. Quick Lesson About DNS/IP Addresses by Amsterdam+Vallon · · Score: 0, Funny

    Just for those of you who might be new here or aren't as geeky as some of us, I'm going to offer up a brief lesson about how computers are associated with names.

    Basically, there's a service called DNS, which stands for the the Domain Name Service. It's charged with the task of mapping a Web site, such as Slashdot.org, to a computer, such as 146.85.116.82.

    A TLD stands for Top Level Domain, and the entire set of *.org domains belong to this particular TLD.

    So, this story is essentially saying that the main TLD computer is going to be running the PostgreSQL flavor of database rather than Oracle or MySQL, for example.

    Computers can always be reached by their IP addresses, however, and since certain services are run on certain ports (e.g. Web traffic - Port 80), one can always use the sequence of 4 numbers between 1-255, such as 158.108.15.93:80, to access information.

    Just a heads up for newbies. Thanks for reading, and hope you learned something.

    --

    Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
    1. Re:Quick Lesson About DNS/IP Addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty certain anyone reading slashdot would know this, thanks for the refresher though...

    2. Re:Quick Lesson About DNS/IP Addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How do I use an IP to reach a virtually hosted site?

    3. Re:Quick Lesson About DNS/IP Addresses by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Also, I hear computers can be used to automate repetitive tasks. It's really quite amazing.

  25. .nz also runs on PostgreSQL by Karora · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was a designer of the system that runs .nz (New Zealand), which is also based around PostgreSQL, running on three replicated back-end application servers.

    The system was developed in mod Perl and went live on October 14th 2002.

    The plan is to release this (including client software) under the GPL after a stabilisation period.

    --

    ...heellpppp! I've been captured by little green penguins!
    1. Re:.nz also runs on PostgreSQL by alonso · · Score: 1

      Can you explain me how have you done the replication?

    2. Re:.nz also runs on PostgreSQL by Karora · · Score: 2, Informative

      Firstly, we were able to make some substantial assumptions about our database updating.

      • Because the system is not directly interacting with registrants, we were able to define a limited set of messages in XML.
      • we ensured that the processing of those messages that effect change includes all change as a component of the response.
      • we ensured that the record ordering in all responses is controlled.
      • we ensured that the content of the response returned from any back-end application server will be identical to any other back-end application server (except for the cryptographic signature).

      Finally, we put a layer on the front-end webserver, which feeds transactions to all of the backends in parallel. For transactions effecting change it waits for answers to be in agreement before passing the response on to the client. For enquiry transactions it just feeds the first response back as soon as it gets it.

      Basically, we worked around the fact that there is no two-phase commit in PostgreSQL. There are a few gotchas in there that we had to workaround, (e.g. updates to any given domain are serialised) but the above was the plan, and it has worked out just fine in practice.

      There is also a backend process to catch up the replication on any server that has to be taken out of the loop for a period of time. Since the backend servers are geographically distributed (with a VPN holding it all together) it is fairly easy for one to drop out of action for a short period.

      All in all, the replication model we used took around 4 weeks effort to implement, which was probably a reasonable price to pay. Even with support for two-phase commit we would still have had a significant amount of effort to use it, and to do the automatic catch-up processing.

      There's more information (a full technical architecture and prototype findings document) at the NZ Domain Name Commissioner's website

      Andrew McMillan.

      --

      ...heellpppp! I've been captured by little green penguins!
  26. Maybe they can hire Great Bridge for support! by jocknerd · · Score: 1

    Maybe my old company Great Bridge will go back into business. Someone forward this story to Frank Batten!

  27. So that's why slashdot has been so slow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No wonder requests to slashdot.org have been so pokey lately...

    Just kidding. I know nothing about PostgreSQL -- but I do know that slashdot's been slow as hell all week.

    1. Re:So that's why slashdot has been so slow... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's because they run MySql.

      Dumbass.

  28. Marketing People are Scum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    In a submission to the ICANN forum during the selection process, Oracle marketing representative Jenny Gelhausen took a swipe at the PostgreSQL system, alleging the database lacked "the transactional features, high availability, security and manageability of any commercial enterprise database".


    It also lacks the multithousand dollar site license.

    1. Re:Marketing People are Scum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh, and another thing. What does that mean, that it lacks transactional features and high availability? I was pretty sure PG had full transaction support, and I was pretty sure you could just go download it without paying for it, or any licenses for it. To me, that seems more readily available than shucking the bucks for Oracle. I can't comment on the security or manageability. I've found PG and Oracle to be equally frustrating to accomplish simple tasks in, partially because of asinine controls set up by DBAs, and partly because of inherent clumsiness in the interface.

  29. in your .org by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    mysql will postrgresql yoursql

  30. Redhat supports PostgreSQL by HighOrbit · · Score: 1

    but they call it "Redhat Database" http://www.redhat.com/software/database/

    1. Re:Redhat supports PostgreSQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If I call it "RedHat Interactive Command Executor" will they support bash?

  31. TCO by oliverthered · · Score: 3, Informative

    from the artical it didn't look like TCO was a factor.

    1: they liked versioning in postgress.
    2: they liked the open source comunity.
    3: Oracle didn't have anything over postgress[that wsa usefull]

    Maybe 2 relates to TCO, the amount you'd have to pay to get the same level of developer support on oracle would be huge.

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  32. I could be wrong, but... by Dthoma · · Score: 1

    ...don't you have to peridoically stop a PostgreSQL server to run VACUUM() or something similar to clean out old deleted rows or something like that? I know some of you who are actual PostgreSQL users will probably correct me (or tell me I'm talking out of my hat), but I think that this might make it hard to run PostgreSQL in a 24/7/365 environment.

    --

    Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".

    1. Re:I could be wrong, but... by cowmix · · Score: 1

      At one point it was recommended to not 'vaccum' on a live database but that was fixed years ago.

    2. Re:I could be wrong, but... by bjohnson · · Score: 1

      Not for the last version or three...

    3. Re:I could be wrong, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm not qualified to give a real answer, but I never have to stop using the database to vacuum it. The performance isn't so snappy if there's a vacuum going on, but I can still interact.

    4. Re:I could be wrong, but... by DontPanicMMH · · Score: 2, Informative

      I was wondering the same thing myself.

      Over the past two years, I've spent a great deal of time working with postgresql with relation to an online game I've been helping to develop (Open Merchant Empires).

      We've been able to get good performance out of postgresql as long as we don't expect 24/7/365 availability. They've made great progress in making the VACUUMs less intrusive, but we've always ran into trouble if we don't impose on the database availability with a regular maintenance schedule (very regular partial vacuums which slow the database down considerably, semi-regular full vacuums which lock up the database, and occasional full rebuilds).

      I'd love to learn how they achieve the high availability I'd expect you'd need for a TLD database server.

    5. Re:I could be wrong, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They way to pull it off is "simply" replicate the database. Conceptually, this needs to be done anyway, with or without the VACUUM problem.

      But, anyway, once it is replicating properly, you remove one database from the mix, perform your maintenance, and then place it back in to the mix to sync up. Once it's synced, it can go live and another DB can then be free to do the same thing.

      Lather, rinse, repeat.

      It's not a trivial problem, but's it's not an insane once either. TLD information isn't particularly onerous to maintain.

      Finally, it's helped by the fact that because 99.99% of the database is essentially read-only, all of that work can be done on a single "master" and that data can be replicated wholesale using something as simple as cp(1). There's no reason for all of the domain updates to be "real time".

      The daily process can be: update master, run maintenance, copy DB files to the other server.

      When you want to switchover, you down the other server, do a quick mv data olddata; mv newdata data, and restart.

      Pretty straightforward.

    6. Re:I could be wrong, but... by JohanV · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, you are wrong, as of PostgreSQL 7.2 VACUUM can run without locking the table completely.

      Garbage collection is a problem every database faces. Due to ACID requirements it is pretty much (absolutely?) impossible to run a database that updates rows without having multiple versions of the same row on disk at some time during the operation. So at some point in time you have to get rid of that duplicate. You can choose to do that after commit of a transaction (or the last transaction for which the row is still visible), but that would potentially make every transaction slower. So in PostgreSQL the choice was made to do this at an administrator determined moment (and I presume that choice also was the easy one).
      In older versions of PostgreSQL VACUUM would lock the entire table and physically force all the valid rows to be rewritten consecutively and then reclaim the space at the end. This mode is still available as VACUUM FULL, but nowadays there is a new mode (sometimes called lazy vacuum) that only marks space safe to be overwritten. Subsequent updates/inserts will overwrite it eventually.
      Regular running of this command will eventually lead to some steady state where there is some x% of bloat in the table, but there is no significant amount of locking required.

    7. Re:I could be wrong, but... by axxackall · · Score: 2, Informative
      You don't stop PostgreSQL server to run vacuum in 7.x versions - you can do it in background.

      What you'll really missed in PostgreSQL for 24/7 is a good replication. But they are working on it.

      By the way, are you sure you want 24/7/365? I think 24/7/52 will be more correct, no? I don't think that 7 years of uptime is a good idea when you want to upgrade your software (usually you stop/restart the service for it) about ever year.

      --

      Less is more !
    8. Re:I could be wrong, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > By the way, are you sure you want 24/7/365? I think 24/7/52 will be more correct, no? I don't think that 7 years of uptime is a good idea when you want to upgrade your software (usually you stop/restart the service for it) about ever year.

      The phrase "24/7/365" is generally spoken as "24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year". Some shops are 24/7/364, they shut down one day a year.

    9. Re:I could be wrong, but... by jason_watkins · · Score: 1

      This is kindof like the garbage collection vs free debate in programming languages.

      The work vaccum does has to happen sometime. One choice might be to provide a mode that gives you 24/7 average case performance by always compacting when it can.

      Or, you could go the deterministic route and chose when you pay that overhead, letting you schedual the best case performance.

      I'm a fan of the latter, but think that the former should be available as well for people who can't schedual maintanence jobs durring downtime or take a mirror offline and back on.

    10. Re:I could be wrong, but... by Sxooter · · Score: 1

      Mind my asking what version you're running? And what kind of hardware? we do pretty well at work on a dual PIII-750 with 1.5gig ram (only about 512Meg used by postgresql, the rest is an app server.)

      I'd say that when vacuum is run on this machine performance drops by about 2 to 5% at most. That's partial not full vacuums.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
  33. In related news... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They tried out mySQL, but found it'd only let 20 people connect at the same time before crashing...

    DOH!

  34. Troll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sorry... I'm all outta food.

  35. vs. MySQL by dracocat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Besides the MySQL rulez comments. How DOES MySQL compare with PostgreSQL. I must admit I was turned off of MySQL a long time ago as soon as I realized it didn't support transactions.

    However, I have never been happy with Microsoft's SQLServer and have heard rumors that MySQL has come along way since I looked at it 3 years ago.

    But what I don't know is where PostgreSQL fits into all of this. I mean, if it IS the better system, why do I only hear mySQL when someone is talking about open source databases?

    1. Re:vs. MySQL by Styx · · Score: 3, Informative

      MySQL performed better than Postgres, especially on select-only queries, until not too long ago. I did some profiling on a web-based app at work where MySQL outperforms Postgres, and it turns out, that only approx. 0.02% of queries are INSERTs or UPDATEs, so it seems MySQL still has an edge in some applications.

      Postgres also seems to have an (unfair, IMHO), reputation for being hard to set up.

      And yes, MySQL has come a long way in the last 3 years, and does support transactions now.

      --
      /Styx
    2. Re:vs. MySQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      It depends on what you're using it for!

      MySQL locks the entire table to insert a row, so no-one else can use the table during inserts - hence why slashdot runs so fsk'ing slowly.

      PostgreSQL does better-than-row-level locking so inserts don't hold up the system. It can also scale much higher than mySQL ever could.

      MySQL also has a tendancy to completely destroy databases during system failure... PostgreSQL doesn't suffer from this! :)

      Postgres has a lot of SQL standard commands in, but mySQL will get them in v. 5 (2010???)

      hope this helps!

    3. Re:vs. MySQL by PizzaFace · · Score: 2, Interesting

      MySQL is faster for simple reads, and therefore a better match for the read-mostly databases that back most websites. PostgreSQL uses versioning for concurrency control, so it scales better with write-often databases. PostgreSQL also has more programming features (triggers, stored procedures, etc.).

      But if you're looking for something to replace Microsoft SQL Server on Windows servers, PostgreSQL is probably not your best bet, because it's really a Unix database and still runs on Windows through a Unix-emulation layer.

    4. Re:vs. MySQL by Gramie2 · · Score: 1

      Interbase (or Firebird in its open source incarnation) is also an excellent alternative. It runs on all kinds of hardware and OSs, is stable, and has a good feature set.

    5. Re:vs. MySQL by glwtta · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Postgres also seems to have an (unfair, IMHO), reputation for being hard to set up.

      Oh yeah, Oracle just shines there. In any case, postgres 7.3 took me about 20 minutes to set up, don't know what everyone's bitching about.

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    6. Re:vs. MySQL by Admiral+Burrito · · Score: 4, Informative
      But what I don't know is where PostgreSQL fits into all of this. I mean, if it IS the better system, why do I only hear mySQL when someone is talking about open source databases?

      Because...

      • MySQL has a commercial entity backing it, that actually makes money selling commercial MySQL licences (the MySQL licence terms are kind of weird, "fully-viral GPL unless you pay us $$$"). This seems to have resulted in some marketoid-speak, which is unusual in the context of an open-source project. For example, "MySQL now supports transactions!" and various other "features", ignoring how fundamental such things are to a real RDBMS and should have always been a part of the design.
      • There are lots of people who don't understand why you would need "subselects" or "outer joins", and didn't know about "transactions" until they read about it in the mysql change log. And MySQL will be a real RDBMS Real Soon Now (tm) so there's no need to switch to anything else and besides you don't really need a real RDBMS anyway.
      • MySQL has a nice Windows installer.
      • PostgreSQL used to suck, once upon a time.
    7. Re:vs. MySQL by JohanV · · Score: 1

      Well, the built process might be a bit tedious, but you can download the source for a native version of PostgreSQL 7.2.1 for Windows.

    8. Re:vs. MySQL by Jadrano · · Score: 2, Informative

      PostgreSQL is particularly good when you don't just store and retrieve data, but want to use complex queries, do a lot of calculations with the data, write your own functions etc. Not only is support for standard SQL more complete with PostgreSQL than with MySQL, PostgreSQL has many extensions that can be very useful. Using these extensions can, of course, mean that moving to another DB system will be difficult, but there are manuals how to port between Oracle and PostgreSQL (e.g. plpgsql and oracle pl/sql). Migrating applications that use extensions of the Microsoft SQL server would certainly be harder because there are fewer similarities than with Oracle.
      I don't have very much experience with MySQL, when I saw some time ago how few in-built functions it has and and didn't see an easy way for programming own functions, I moved to PostgreSQL. It's possible that MySQL has become better in that respect in the meantime.
      I mainly use PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL server, and I'd say that from a programming perspective PostgreSQL is better for extensions. I'm not sure if newer versions of Microsoft SQL server now support writing your own aggregate functions and have got rid of the maximum nesting level in stored procedures, in any case none of this has been a problem with PostgreSQL for a long time.

      As has been mentioned, an important reason why PostgreSQL isn't mentioned as often as MySQL probably is that it doesn't run natively on windows.

    9. Re:vs. MySQL by jsong · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Postgres also seems to have an (unfair, IMHO), reputation for being hard to set up.

      Agreed. Whoever thinks that PostgreSQL is hard to set up has never set up Oracle!

      In the recent past, I have set up PostgreSQL on Linux, Mac OS X, and Win32/Cygwin. Setting it up on Linux and Mac OS X is an incredible breeze, it doesn't matter if you are installing from source or a package. It is only difficult to set up on Win32, and only because the user accounts and permissions are (sort of) separately managed across Win32 and Cygwin.

      And thank goodness PostgreSQL doesn't have that ridiculous TNS layer. If TCP/IP and DNS were good enough for Grandpa, they are good enough for me!

    10. Re:vs. MySQL by jason_watkins · · Score: 1

      People have a lot of dogma, so I'll start off by saying both are worthwhile options and useful in situations that warrent them: right tool for right job.

      In my experience the biggest difference has been with scalability. MySQL is typically faster if you have very few simultainious connections (ie, 4 or less). Unlike what some people say, MySQL seems to handle complex queries just fine unless you happen to hit the odd poorly optimized query.

      But, if you're going to have a system with more connections, in my experience, Postgre scales MUCH better. It maintains pretty even throughput and latency at past 100 connections in what I've tested. MySQL fell flat when I did the same tests on it, but that was a while ago, things may be better now. When I looked, the big reasons for this seemed to be Postgre's more sophisticated locking and heavy use of shared memory for caches, etc.

      Postgre's sore spot is replication.

      I also think people are naievly obcessed with speed, or optimize the wrong way. I'm tired of seeing web apps that do 10 redundant queries over and over and never cache the results. Even if you're leaning on the database do cache and use persistant connections, that's a whole lot of memory copying that need not happen. The people that write this crap are typically the ones that are "Postgre is to slow".

      Yeah, anything's slow if you code lame :/. I've never had a problem with Posgre's speed on any project.

    11. Re:vs. MySQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      Of course, if your server is only functioning as a database server, it doesn't really matter what OS you run on it, now does it? You could always try a faster, more stable server operating system to store your databases on. As many have said before, best tool for the job. This means being willing to be OS agnostic and simply use whatever platform works the best for the task at hand -- especially if users never actually have to see it directly.

      Say it with me: heterogeneity.

      I knew you could. :-)

    12. Re:vs. MySQL by CaptainZapp · · Score: 1
      Oh yeah, Oracle just shines there.

      Yup, especially 8i for Linux, which was linked towards the wrong glibc and churned around at 99.9% CPU usage upon database creation for the next 17 years, or until the CPU blew up.

      Gawd! How I really, really hate those glitzy java tools in order to install a frigging database server.

      --
      ich bin der musikant

      mit taschenrechner in der hand

      kraftwerk

    13. Re:vs. MySQL by Styx · · Score: 1

      I just tried installing some software, to let our networked UPS shut down some Linux servers, before it runs out of juice. It requires Java -- and X11!

      For something supposed to run on a fucking server?? Oh, and even worse, it doesn't work. I think I'll be firing up the network sniffer, come monday, and reverse engineer their ass-tastic protocol.

      --
      /Styx
  36. "I am not Michael Jackson, I am a HUMAN BEING!" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Actually, Michael Jackson's head did explode -- in a room full of Pepsi. /tasteless

  37. isn't it cool... by ubiquitin · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...that the entire O'Reilly Practical PostgreSQL book was put online?

    I've spent so much time lately in the (relatively) flat-table world of MySQL that I had forgotten about inherited tables, subselects, constraints in table definitions, and oh yes, vacuuming. ;) Looks like it is time to revisit postgres, especially for some db-agnostic PEAR apps I'm building. For me, it's the subselects that really make it worth the effort.

    --
    http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
    1. Re:isn't it cool... by catenos · · Score: 1

      I've spent so much time lately in the (relatively) flat-table world of MySQL that I had forgotten about inherited tables, subselects, constraints in table definitions,

      Umm. Constraints are there with InnoDB for what? 2 years?

      and oh yes, vacuuming. ;) Looks like it is time to revisit postgres, especially for some db-agnostic PEAR apps I'm building. For me, it's the subselects that really make it worth the effort.

      Well, or you might have a look at the current alpha (version 4.1) were basic sub-selects and derived tables are already running. Though, without much optimization yet.

      That is not meant as shameless plug (although it probably is ;-), but only because you sounded interested in MySQL I thought I update you on the fact that those features you are missing are under full work currently.

      --
      Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
    2. Re:isn't it cool... by Malcontent · · Score: 1

      Anything about table inheritance or triggers? I remember once mysql said they would never implement stored procs or triggers or referential integrity, it looks like they changed their minds.

      --

      War is necrophilia.

    3. Re:isn't it cool... by catenos · · Score: 1

      Anything about table inheritance or triggers?

      Well, http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/ANSI_diff_Triggers.htm l suggest that triggers will come somewhere in 5.0 probably. Heard nothing about table inheritance, though.

      I remember once mysql said they would never implement stored procs or triggers or referential integrity,

      I am interested in MySQL since when 3.21.x was current (1997?) and cannot remember such a statement. Surely, once they said, that they have no plans to do so. But that is not the same: don't having it on the list of things to be done is quite different from claiming to never implement it.

      Also they often said, that when any of that feature is to come, it may not make existing stuff slower or it will be at least optional (and probably disabled by default).

      AFAICT, the facts they created in the meantime do not contradict themselves yet.

      it looks like they changed their minds.

      OTOH, there would be nothing wrong with changing your mind once every 5 years or so. :-)

      --
      Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
    4. Re:isn't it cool... by wormbin · · Score: 1

      I'm a big fan of O'Reilly books and I was severely disappointed after purchasing Practical PostgreSQL.

      Most of the book is a duplication of the PostgreSQL manual. At the end of the book contains a chapter that is a 40 page advertisement of the author's proprietary Apache module: LXP.

      What would really be appreciated is a book that dealt with individual problems and gotchas that beginning PostgreSQL users, devolpers and administrators commonly encounter.

      Come on O'Reilly. Don't tarnish your good reputation by publishing crap like this.

  38. wait for IBM by axxackall · · Score: 0, Troll
    That's the monster who goes after PostgreSQL and forces users to migrate to DB/2.

    Sourceforge has been planning to migrate from MySQL to PostgreSQL and even re-wrote part of their software. Untill IBM came. Now it's powered by DB/2.

    Under the pressure from IBM Red Hat has dropped PostgreSQL in a flaviour of DB/2, forgeiing that with RedHat Linux they selled PostgreSQL called RedHat Database for few years.

    Several open-source projects' bugzilla repositories has been forced to move from PostgreSQL to DB/2.

    IBM doesn't afraid Linux as they don't care what OS is installed on their x86 computers and they have the profit on RS6K more from hardware and applications than from AIX. But IBM is really scared by PostgreSQL as a competitor of DB/2. No wonder they use similar methods as Microsoft does being scared by Linux.

    So, don't dance congratulating the win. Wait for the monster.

    --

    Less is more !
    1. Re:wait for IBM by Dan+Ost · · Score: 1

      Can you please give us links that discuss this?

      I'd like to know if IBM can make a compelling
      argument for using DB/2 instead of PostgreSQL.

      --

      *sigh* back to work...
    2. Re:wait for IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think that redhat is still supporting Postgresql. You might checkout this link

      From the discussions that I have been following on the hackers list they are still paying developers. You might check again.

    3. Re:wait for IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ehm, could you explain to us what kind of leverage IBM has over open source projects? If I were the administrator of an open source project and IBM would come by and tell me to switch databases I'd tell them to go mind their own business, thank you. And according to the Bugzilla installation manual it uses MySQL, not Postgres or DB/2. Also, Red Hat still maintains Red Hat Database as evidenced by the README on their ftp and you can still download it from the same place. And if you look at the SRPMs of Advanced Server 2.1 you'll note that Red Hat ships Postgres with AS2.1.

      So, care to give us some supporting evidence?

      Lourens
    4. Re:wait for IBM by axxackall · · Score: 1
      --

      Less is more !
    5. Re:wait for IBM by DAldredge · · Score: 1

      The compelling IBM argument was "We will give you db2 & services for free" VA_'WHATEVER_THEY_ARE_CALLED_THIS_MONTH' said OK!

    6. Re:wait for IBM by ipjohnson · · Score: 1

      Well I know DB/2 does an amayzing job or clustering and has great failure recovery. I mean DB/2 wasn't designed as a stand alone DB server it was designed to run on big machines 32+ processors and clusters. Postgres wasn't. Its not so much about can it do SQL well ... most all of them do it well it all about what else does it give you in terms of expansion ,recovery , ease of setup, support .... some of these postgres might win but in the biggies DB/2 is really an exceptional product.

      p.s. I am not an IBM employee I'm just speaking from experience and information I've read about them.

    7. Re:wait for IBM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry, I'm still not seeing anything that justifies your "That's the monster who goes after PostgreSQL and forces users to migrate to DB/2" statement [my emphasis]. Examples of *forced* migrations to DB/2, please, or an apology for posting such FUD.

  39. .. You are, but the real problem is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    You can vacuum any time without shutting things down. You don't even lock a table thanks to the wonderful MVCC. But..

    The real problem with Postgresql, however, is that if you are doing lots of updates where the keys increase forever, the index files grow forever. You can, of course, drop and recreate them (which we do in a cron job), but in a real 24/7 environment you've got a real problem when your queries all turn into table-scans because the indexes aren't built yet.

    Here is some more information (seeIndex Maintenance? )

    The only option I know if is to have two sets of tables and swap between them.

    -- ac at work

    1. Re:.. You are, but the real problem is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't you create a new index before dropping the old?

    2. Re:.. You are, but the real problem is... by rtaylor · · Score: 1

      Most certainly.

      The big crux is you need a table lock to build the index so that new entries aren't written to or removed from the table during this time.

      --
      Rod Taylor
    3. Re:.. You are, but the real problem is... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the thing i don't like about postgres is the lack of a "create _or_ _replace_ view" function. Currently you have to drop your view before recreating it, which means that your application is down for a bit while this happens.

  40. Fitting fortune by enoor · · Score: 1
    After reading the article, and Mohan's comments about no one being fired for choosing Oracle, how fitting it is that the fortune that shows up on the bottom of the page is:
    Why not go out on a limb? Isn't that where the fruit is?
  41. I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by mangu · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Oracle, as most commercial DBMSs, doesn't let you export the database in SQL format. Of course, you can write scripts to do that, but it shows how the commercial companies are always trying to find ways to lock you in.

    1. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by zaqattack911 · · Score: 1

      No shit? Is there an SQL dump feature for MS SQL ? I need to convert one to postgreSQL soon.

    2. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by Chazmyrr · · Score: 1

      Enterprise Manager

      All Tasks->Generate SQL Scripts

      Make sure you check the boxes to include constraints, foreign keys, indexes, etc.

      You can even script the Agent jobs. Don't know if anything else can read them though.

      Hope you aren't using DTS packages.

    3. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Use the Database Migration Wizard from pgAdmin. I would recommend to do a migration of the schema first, then check the schema for problems (for instance, make sure the datatypes for fields FKs reference to are always the same, even INT4 vs. INT8 matters) and then import the data.

    4. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by sporty · · Score: 1

      Oracle wouldn't care. It's a vendor to vendor (verisign to affilias) transition.

      It's not up to oracle to get verisign's data to PIR/affilias.

      --

      -
      ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

    5. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by justins · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Oracle, as most commercial DBMSs, doesn't let you export the database in SQL format. Of course, you can write scripts to do that, but it shows how the commercial companies are always trying to find ways to lock you in.

      Who modded this up?

      There is no "SQL format" for "exporting databases." You'll need to write scripts in any case.
      --
      Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
    6. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by larien · · Score: 1
      Fact is, there isn't a standard way to export things like packages, stored procedures etc. Every database has some specific features which don't match the others, so you have to have a vendor specific method to export databases for backup purposes.

      If you just want data out of a table, it isn't that hard to write a select statement to parse out to an insert statement.

    7. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by catenos · · Score: 1
      Oracle, as most commercial DBMSs, doesn't let you export the database in SQL format. Of course, you can write scripts to do that, but it shows how the commercial companies are always trying to find ways to lock you in.
      [...] There is no "SQL format" for "exporting databases."

      Huh? Why everyone in this thread seems to concentrate on the wording? Anyone using databases should know that he simply meant a SQL dump. For the clueless: creating SQL commands, which will create a copy of the database in question, when run through an appropriate tool (for running SQL commands in batch) and writing them to a file.

      You'll need to write scripts in any case.

      Huh? Why? Any open source database comes with the tools to run such a SQL dump. And most commercial ones, too, I presume.

      --
      Keep an eye on which arguments are silently dropped in replies. Not always, but often times it's very telling.
    8. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by mangu · · Score: 1
      If you just want data out of a table, it isn't that hard to write a select statement to parse out to an insert statement.


      No, I don't just want data out of a table. I want to do exactly what was mentioned in the article: get a complete database which is currently in Oracle and migrate it to postgres. Let me disagree with you, there IS a standard way to export things, it's called Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. What I mentioned is that Oracle has no built-in provision to create a SQL file which will contain all the data in the database. Postgres DOES have a simple command to do that. OK, it will be a huge file, so what? At $1/gigabyte I don't care, what I want is my data in a standard text file that other databse management software programs will understand.

    9. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by mangu · · Score: 1
      There is no "SQL format" for "exporting databases." You'll need to write scripts in any case.


      If you are locked into a commercial database you'll have to write scripts. If you use PostgreSQL or MySQL you can export all your data and your tables structure into an SQL language file with one simple command.

    10. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by MadAhab · · Score: 2, Insightful
      sorry, but the guy's got a point. the most common open source databases have ways to export the data in the form of sql that can be used to re-create the database. that's not the same as a dump of, say, an oracle database. if you could do this from oracle, or sqlserver, it would be easier to convert from one type of database to another. they make this harder just to show you what a punk-ass bitch you are (and you are). of course you can write scripts to accomplish the same. they just make it a little more difficult to create friction; and that friction is called vendor lock-in.

      stop being such a ig-nant spinning motha focka.

      --
      Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
    11. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by bwt · · Score: 1

      If you are talking about reverse engineering the DDL SQL from the objects, then there are many scripts available for doing so. Oracle's designer product can do this for you, TOAD, an Oracle IDE from Quest, can do this, and free open source scripts to do it are a dime a dozen. TOAD's rebuild table feature is particularly handy for doing things like changing column names or sizes or orders.

      If all you want is to dump data in your tables to SQL inserts, then that is a VERY suboptimal solution if your data volumes are anywhere close to that needed to justify using Oracle. Dumping the data out directly to a flat (say tab delimited) file and using your target database's native loader (for oracle this would be sql*loader) will save you probably at least a factor of 10 in runtime.

      On the other hand, if you really want to get insert SQL, how hard is it to type in:

      SELECT 'INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (' || t.field1 || ', ' ... || t.field-n || ')'
      FROM table1 t

      In fact writing a PL/SQL procedure to generate the above using native dynamic SQL after taking in the table name is also trivial, as is writing a PL/SQL procedure to call it for every table in your favorite schema or the whole database.

    12. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by zjbs14 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I don't think they're trying to lock anyone in, I just think they realize that generating thousands or millions of INSERT statements is a really crappy way to move a database. Using a specialized bulk extract/import tool is usually a lot easier and a lot faster.

      All of the major database have utilities to import/export data in user-defined formats, so I can't see that Oracle not providing an instant "generate sql script" command is keeping anyone from moving anything off of Oracle. Besides if you really want to do it, you can get free Toad. Works great.

      --
      No sig, sorry.
    13. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      > There is no "SQL format" for "exporting
      > databases." You'll need to write scripts in
      > any case.

      Don't flame "justins" for this statement -- he's right. The INSERT statment is still in committee and should be part of the SQL standard in 2008. Rumour has it that such a statement will allow "DBA"s to "put" data into SQL tables; data which can later be retrieved; data which can flow out of the tables, menstrual-like, though SELECT and JOIN alike, Mother and Father, Man and Wife, dread prophets of the corporatology, watching and giggling as the Sphinxes of Ignorance crumple before the blinding sun of the Software of Enterprise.

      INSERT! Expect it soon!

    14. Re:I guess Oracle didn't help in the transition by platypus · · Score: 1

      Take a look at pgadmin 2 and the pgMigration plugin, to be found at
      http://www.pgadmin.org

      (under downloads).

      pgMigration is a helper to export databases from odbc sources or access files to postgres. I have a vague memory for something more specialized for MSSQL, but I don't remember right now (take a look at the various mailing lists, perhaps).

  42. Non Sufficient Funds by hendridm · · Score: 1

    By the looks of the .NSF in their URL they are running Blowtus Goats (Lotus Notes to the lay-person who was lucky enough never to have worked with Lotus "databases"). I'd rather use MS Access through WINE on a Linux box with an AMD processor through a dialup connection.

    LOL, while taking a break from typing this, I did a Netcraft lookup on their domain. It says, they are running Windows NT/98, which isn't too surprising, but this was:

    "NT4/Windows 98 users include ABB Asea Brown Boveri Ltd, British Nuclear Fuels Ltd and Ernst & Young International"

    I guess Chernobyl can't blame their disaster on a BSOD, but maybe these guys can. I mean, christ, upgrade to Millenium Edition already.

    1. Re:Non Sufficient Funds by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I'd rather use MS Access through WINE on a Linux box with an AMD processor through a dialup connection.
      Okay MS Access sucks as a DB
      Wine sucks as a Windows replacement
      Linux sucks as an OS
      and dialup sucks anyways

      But AMD Processors are great - if you'd have said AMD K6 I could understand you tho, but thats no longer state of the art.
      Judge AMD by the Athlon or Athlon64/Opteron

    2. Re:Non Sufficient Funds by cyb97 · · Score: 1
      Perhaps that explains why British Nuclear Fuels Ltd lost contracts to operate several sites?
      (Err... I guess those were nuclear-plants-sites not websites...)

    3. Re:Non Sufficient Funds by deaddrunk · · Score: 1

      They're not known as British Nuclear Fools for nothing.....

      --
      Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
  43. Non-commercial? by mcoko · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Known mostly as the domain for non-commercial organisations, .org is the Internet's fifth largest top-level domain, with more than 2.4 million registered domain names worldwide.

    So Slashdot is Non-Commercial? I don't know. Is non-commercial the same as non-profit, is /. non-profit?

    How strict are they about that. You would think that they would be but I have not heard. Slashdot used to be free/non-ads (except for the one at the top) but now there is an add on every comment page unless you pay. Is that non-commercial?

    --
    www.fotoforay.com
    1. Re:Non-commercial? by stevel · · Score: 3, Informative

      As far as I know, there has never been any regulation as to who can and can't register a .org domain. The association with not-for-profits is a convention, not a rule. Same with .net, which initially was for ISPs and other network service providers.

      Nowadays, .org and .net are largely used by registrants who couldn't get the .com they wanted. (On the other hand, I have two .org domains registered for legitimate non-profits, a town band and a cat shelter.)

    2. Re:Non-commercial? by mcoko · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the info. Now if I could ever MOD I would +1 Informative your ass. But alas I am non-moderatable. What a world.

      --
      www.fotoforay.com
    3. Re:Non-commercial? by aardvarkjoe · · Score: 2, Funny

      ...is /. non-profit?

      Non-profit, no. No-profit, you bet.

      --

      How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
    4. Re:Non-commercial? by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 1

      Nope, there used to be a rule against using .org for for-profit sites. I'm not sure how heavily it was enforced, but you had to at least claim you were a non-profit when you ordered the domain. That went away sometime around 1997. Of course before 1995, domain names were free.

    5. Re:Non-commercial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ulch - that meat was tainted! You feel deathly sick.

      #pray

  44. PIR transition details by shessel · · Score: 4, Informative

    The transition details can be found on the Public Interest Registry's Homepage. In short, they'll close the registry at 14:00 UTC tomorrow, transfer to Afilias's systems, and reopen the registrations on Sunday at 23:00 UTC.

  45. Myths by democritus · · Score: 1
    I guess we can now dispel the "untested in mission-critical applications" myth.
    But can we dispel the "doesn't run solidly and reliably for long periods of time myth?"

    I don't car how much you test it, I'd like it to actually pass the test. Here's hoping .org still resolves in a couple of months.
    1. Re:Myths by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I had a site that did about 65k pages per day, about 40,000 of them hit a Postgres db, and half of them did writes. It played just fine (0 downtime) for 8 months, when I killed the site because it cost me 600 bucks a month in bandwidth and generated 100 bucks a month in revenue.

  46. dispel which myth? by dan_bethe · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I guess we can now dispel the "untested in mission-critical applications" myth."

    Yeah. Or we could do that in regard to all the other mission-critical applications it's been in all this time! :)

  47. I thought that by cjjjer · · Score: 0, Troll

    Slashdot is the only .org site I ever visit. I was begining to think that it was the only one. A friggin' Vic 20 could serve up the requests for .org.

  48. DNS is not mission critical by guacamole · · Score: 1

    ... or maybe it is for an ISP.. but they're not gonna lose millions of $$ because of a one minute or even 10 second glitch in DNS. Ppl who complain that PSQL is not their choice for mission critical applications are talking about running their enterprise apps on it, not DNS.

    1. Re:DNS is not mission critical by jfinke · · Score: 1

      DNS is mission critical. We run an enterprise ebusiness in the transportation industry. Two days ago, ATT, our dns provider, had some serious issues with their dns (DDOS). People couldn't get to our website unless they had data cached. It cost us business.

    2. Re:DNS is not mission critical by devleopard · · Score: 1

      Yeah, DNS is critical, but PG won't be running DNS - it'll only be the back-end data store for registration info, etc. PG could die, and DNS would keep working. (there just wouldn't be any registrations or updates) So by definition, the job that PG will be doing isn't mission critical. (though it probably would be if you have to change your DNS info *now*)

      Also keep in mind that what the registrant does, and what your direct DNS provider does, are completely. All of the root servers could simultaneously explode and the Internet would keep going for a while.

      --
      The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
    3. Re:DNS is not mission critical by jfinke · · Score: 1

      Oh, I understand that... However, I believe that the original post was addressing his opinion that DNS in of itself is not mission critical. Sorry, but it is. Smart people may be able to get around it using IP addresses, but 99.999% of people out there would not know what to do when it crashes.

  49. How to pronounce? by FireBreathingDog · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Will someone please tell me how the hell to pronounce PostgreSQL?

    Or are we supposed to pronounce it POST-GRE-SEE-KWEL? Or POST-GRES-CUE-ELL? Or POST-GRES-QUERY LANGUAGE?

    And where the hell did that name come from? Did they take "Ingres", and increment it (like how C became C++), thereby making it "Postgres"? Then "PostgreSQL" means "the better-than-Ingres query language"?

    I hate it when techies come up with names. It always ends up being something that's either stupid and meaningless, like C#, or self-referential and too-cute-by-half, like GNU. Recursive acronym my ass.

    1. Re:How to pronounce? by mangu · · Score: 2, Funny

      I agree, the name IS stupid. I just say POST-GRES. Well, anyhow, maybe it's a better name than "Edsel"...

    2. Re:How to pronounce? by loteck · · Score: 2, Informative
      as usual..

      everything has your answer.

      Along with the answer to, you betcha, everything else!

    3. Re:How to pronounce? by h3 · · Score: 2, Informative

      POST-GRES-CUE-ELL.

      They have an mp3 on their web site.

      I usually just call it "postgrez" or "pee-gee".

      -h3

    4. Re:How to pronounce? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      I pronounce it "GoatseQL".

    5. Re:How to pronounce? by Sxooter · · Score: 1

      That's funny. someone please mod it up.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
    6. Re:How to pronounce? by phallstrom · · Score: 2, Informative

      First question of the faq...

      http://www.us.postgresql.org/docs/faq-english.ht ml #1.1

    7. Re:How to pronounce? by gabe · · Score: 1

      I don't know why people bother asking these questions on slashdot when a simple google search will provide perfectly accurate answers. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q =postgresql+history

      If you're lazy, then here's the answer: Ingres was a research project at Berkeley, started by Michael Stonebraker (around the time when IBM was still working on their first relational database technology, or shortly after it was publicly introduced). Ingres was forked into a company, Relational Technologies. Ingres/Relational Technologies was later purchased by Computer Associates.

      Back at Berkeley the work on Ingres continued, but with a new name Postgres (post-ingres). Postgres was later taken by Illustra and turned into yet another commercial database product. Eventually Illustra was purchased by Informix and integrated into their Informix Universal Server.

      Work on the Postgres database continued still at Berkeley. SQL support was added to the database and it was renamed to Postgres95. (Can you guess what year that happened in?)

      After Postgres95 the folks involved in the project became interested in getting the open source community involved. At that point the product was renamed PostgreSQL, which is pronounced post-gres-cue-ell.

      --
      Gabriel Ricard
  50. Smoking crack... by NerveGas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "untested in mission-critical applications"?

    You'd have to be a completely ignorant moron to believe that. A good number of large companies have been running PostgreSQL succesfully in mission-critical situation for *years*.

    It's been used in network-monitoring apps for deployment in military vehicles, $30 million POS systems, medical systems, ticketmaster, a good number of heavy-traffic web sites, and just about everything else you can think of.

    Anybody who told you it hadn't been tested was living long in the past.

    steve

    --
    Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
    1. Re:Smoking crack... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It's been used in network-monitoring apps for deployment in .. $30 million POS systems

      I thought MySQL was the database used in POS systems!

    2. Re:Smoking crack... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here Here!

      My company runs $150 Million dollars in sales data through PostgreSQL every year for a Fortune 1000 company . . . and have been doing so for 3 years straight.

    3. Re:Smoking crack... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      only $150 million..that's child's play .. we did over $3.2 BILLION!!!!!!

    4. Re:Smoking crack... by The+Bungi · · Score: 1
      We did $7.1 trillion in sales last year, excluding special charges.

      Is it just me or is there's something inherently weird in a thread between two ACs claiming millions of dollars in sales handled by a database for possibly non-existant companies in nebulous countries.

    5. Re:Smoking crack... by bruthasj · · Score: 1

      Got links?

  51. Re:Welcome to the Revolution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    bah what a shameless plug

    i loaded your site a couple times without cash just in case you pay per bandwidth hehheheheheheheh

    MUHARHARHARHAARHARHAR

    sorry have to get my medication now

  52. Right tool, Right job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If I here those words again, I think my head will explode. I don't remember anyone saying to use a wrench for a hammer if you have both. When people argue these things, they are argueing that a tool is the right tool for a job. PostgreSQL is being argued to be a tool that can be used for enterprise jobs. Either confront that or not, don't just state the obvious. No one said PostgreSQL is the only database to use.

    I here this everytime a programming language is mentioned too. Either say Java can't do what perl can, or Java is slower than perl and back those up. Don't say Java is good and Perl is good because everyone knows that.

    I don't mean to take my frustrations out on you poor poster, it's just high time people realize that this is like argueing philips or flat-head. It should be a poll option because it's preference, not because there ever is a right or wrong database for a job. It's a choice. After this has been going for a while without problems, we can then proceed to choose PostgreSQL to save money or because we like it better than Oracle or DB2.

    It's as annoying as:
    1: In soviet russia, Vi>Emacs
    2: ?
    3: goatse.cx, "MOD PARENT UP"

    1. Re:Right tool, Right job by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You should get the pulitzer prize for this post!

      MOD PARENT UP *g* sorry, couldnt resist :)

    2. Re:Right tool, Right job by mmclean · · Score: 1
      it's just high time people realize that this is like argueing philips or flat-head.

      F - U, everyone who is anyone knows that philips is far superior.
    3. Re:Right tool, Right job by ckaminski · · Score: 1


      Unless you REALLY have a clue, and then Torx is obviously the superior choice...
      </HUMOR>

  53. Postgre by GPTurismo · · Score: 1

    Well, how complicated is the database anyway? I mean, Postgre is not that bad of a system, just a little akward at times in programming. But you can't just say how many hits the database takes as a whole, or just say it is or not mission critial. You have to look at how many tables get hit or completely walked for each query, how large the data that must be indexed/scanned during each hit, how complex the data is, the complexity of the relations... etc. etc. Oracle is just probably not worth the cost for the application needed and is just to much horsepower for what is needed now or in the forseeable future. Especially when they can hire a few solid programmers cheap to make sure the systsem is well maintained. I just think it's nice to see PostgreSQL getting used more and more, especially since the open source database community has been a little biased for a while towards MySQL... or in my opinion anyway ;)

  54. Maybe This Explains... by kirn_malinus · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Why Slashdot's been taking so long to load all morning. Normally I open a browser window and it's there instantly... but today it's been taking so long I've just been giving up and going to other sites.

    --
    All circuits busy.
  55. Oracle also dropped FORTRAN by mangu · · Score: 1
    In my company, we have an Oracle DB, from which some very mission critical applications written in FORTRAN get inputs. A few years ago, we had to upgrade from Oracle 7.3 to 8i, because the old AIX server was developing some old-age problems. To our disgust and surprise, we found that Oracle had completely dropped FORTRAN support from their product.


    Worse than that, it took several months for the Oracle support people to actually find out what had happened to FORTRAN. At first they told us that it was still there, but our new system wasn't configured right. Dozens of emails later, they finally found out the truth, and admitted it to us: you cannot rely on Oracle.

    1. Re:Oracle also dropped FORTRAN by MmmmAqua · · Score: 1

      To our disgust and surprise, we found that Oracle had completely dropped FORTRAN support from their product.

      At first they told us that it was still there, but our new system wasn't configured right. Dozens of emails later, they finally found out the truth, and admitted it to us: you cannot rely on Oracle.

      If you can't rely on Oracle, you either have unrealistic expectations of their support department, or you do not understand the system. That's not a personal attack - Oracle is huge, and it takes an enormous investment of time and energy to become an Oracle expert; that is why people build whole careers solely around working with Oracle. But it does mean that before you attack Oracle, you should do your best to understand it.

      Case in point: I have sitting behind me the Pro*FORTRAN manual for Oracle 8i, which we are currently using (8i, not FORTRAN), and just reviewed the installation requirements for 9i, which included a section on installation requirements for Pro*FORTRAN.

      --
      Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
    2. Re:Oracle also dropped FORTRAN by mangu · · Score: 1

      Yes, I see you agree with me completely. It's so hard to become an Oracle expert that one must sometimes rely on their support. And there's where they are so inadequate. I have seen those pro*fortran manuals for Oracle 8i, too. They DO have the documentation, but profor.exe is nowhere to be found. After searching thoroughly for a year or so, they (Oracle) ended admitting that it's all a mistake, even if pro*fortran manuals still exist, the executable program does not exist anymore. We ended creating it again from scratch, a pre-processor that gets fortran code with exec sql statements and outputs valid fortran code to f2c, which is then processed through pro*c. For others who may need this solution, we put it in sourceforge.

  56. Commercial Apps by bookroach · · Score: 1

    I have been waiting for large financial and enterprise management apps to support Postgresql, cutting the all important TCO down to just support and hardware of the database. Although GNU Enterprise GNU Enterprise may become the thing small companies or finacially strapped have been looking for

    --
    GTA3 is like the Sims to me - MC Hawking
  57. Why? Aren't there still better choices? by Jayson · · Score: 1, Troll

    I am assuming you want pure reporting speed and that there will be a couple of batch additions and updates a day. Is this a correct assuption of the usage pattern, or am I off?

    In that case there is a whole class of databases -- are better than traditional sytle -- of column oriented databases that will smoke Oracle or PostgreSQL. Fastest amoung them is probably KDB. It doesn't seem like there is that much information in the database, so maybe even a memory resident database would perform better.

    I still don't understand, why PostreSQL? It is a cost issue? It certainly isn't a decision based on performance.

    1. Re:Why? Aren't there still better choices? by Sxooter · · Score: 1

      Basically, from what I've understood, they use Postgresql to maintain all the site admin / owner info and such, then push out from the database every x number of minutes to their dns servers the updates in a flat file or something like that.

      So, Postgresql doesn't handle the load of DNS directly, it handles all the backend data maintenance and probably billing and such.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
    2. Re:Why? Aren't there still better choices? by johnnyb · · Score: 1

      Are there any others besides KDB? Are any of them free?

      Of course, speed is only one issue in a database. in fact, just using a relational database makes a speed slowdown, but it is so that you can have a malleable, sensible environment.

  58. Recent benchmarks comparing PostgreSQL to MySQL? by Dan+Ost · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When I google looking for benchmarks comparing
    PostgreSQL to MySQL, I can't find anything more
    recent that June, 2001.

    I know that PostgreSQL has come a long way in
    the last 2 years, so I'm unwilling to form any
    opinions on benchmark information that is out
    of date.

    --

    *sigh* back to work...
  59. No shit. by NineNine · · Score: 1

    Of course it doesn't. SQL isn't a format. It's a "Structured Query Language". I don't even know what you're trying to do.

    As far as exporting, of course you can export. You can export whatever you want in virtually any format you want, and have been since, well, for as long as I remember. Ask a DBA.

    1. Re:No shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well said.

    2. Re:No shit. by WWWWolf · · Score: 1
      Of course it doesn't. SQL isn't a format. It's a "Structured Query Language". I don't even know what you're trying to do.

      Probably something like pg_dump -d which produces a text file with a huge load of CREATE TABLEs and INSERTs and other weird capitalized imperative forms of verbs. I'm fairly certain this kind of feature exists in one form or another for the commercial DBs too, or otherwise they wouldn't be that profitable...

    3. Re:No shit. by NineNine · · Score: 1

      I'm not sure if the basic Oracle RDBMS package has that (again, a DBA familiar with SQL loader would know for sure), but there are definitely third party programs (such as Toad) that do that. Oracle is *very* modular. All that stuff isn't included in their basic databases. They're either Oracle or 3rd party add-ons. But, with Oracle being one of the oldest and most robust RDBMS' out there that's still alive (along with DB2), you can pretty much find a tool for any task for Oracle. Your data is not, contrary to what the poster said, in any way "locked" into Oracle.

    4. Re:No shit. by mangu · · Score: 2, Informative

      I didn't say the data was locked into Oracle. What I said was that you cannot create an SQL file containing the data using just a *simple* *Oracle* command. I can write a one-line command that will dump the database into a proprietary Oracle binary file, but I cannot do that to dump the data to an SQL file. I *can* dump a postgres database to an SQL file using an one-line postgres command. That SQL file could be used (maybe a few small modifications would be needed) to import all my data into a MySQL database, for instance.

    5. Re:No shit. by mangu · · Score: 1
      SQL isn't a format.


      Oh, really? So, if I mention "a green Ford", you'll say there's no such thing, because green is a color and Ford is a car? What I mean by "data in SQL format" is data written into a file such that a program written in the SQL language will be able to read. Do you need a simple diagram to understand that?


      I don't even know what you're trying to do.


      Try reading the Oracle Database Administration course material, A80, volume 2, pages 16.29 to 16.47. There you'll get a pretty good idea of how you do export/import of data in Oracle, and what you can do with those commands.


      Ask a DBA.


      I am a DBA.

    6. Re:No shit. by Sloppy · · Score: 1
      I don't even know what you're trying to do.
      Postgresql lets you dump the database to a text file that is just a bunch of SQL commands. When those commands are executed on an empty database, they create the tables and insert the data.

      Thus, the SQL text itself, is a data format.

      --
      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    7. Re:No shit. by MattRog · · Score: 1

      So what's your point? ASCII dumps are HORRIBLY inefficient -- the fact that you *can't* do a bin dump in MySQL/PostgreSQL is horrid -- why support something that provides NO benefit to your application (in this case, Oracle).

      --

      Thanks,
      --
      Matt
    8. Re:No shit. by autocracy · · Score: 1

      Because it's very standard. Nothing special in that file, and it can be manipulated as if it were text. If you don't like the efficiency (I don't when it come to large dumps), pipe it to bzip2 or something. Efficient!

      --
      SIG: HUP
    9. Re:No shit. by MattRog · · Score: 1

      You can perform text-only dumps via bcp (in Sybase ASE and MS SQL). I am sure there is a facility for Oracle that does the same thing.

      That aside, not only is the SQL-dump size inefficent, *loading* the data is horribly inefficient (over bin dump) because your indexes must be rebuilt.

      Also, you can't (to the best of my knowledge) paralellize the loading in MySQL and PostgreSQL -- meaning you perform 1,000,000 serialized inserts (more or less).

      So, the provided mechanisms (bin dump, and CSV-type format) are the best methods to go about doing things. The SQL-based method is a very simplistic, and worst-case solution to backups.

      --

      Thanks,
      --
      Matt
    10. Re:No shit. by autocracy · · Score: 1

      Copy the actual DB file perhaps? Granted if you're only trying to do individual tables then you'll need to modify that idea a little bit, but that's something...

      --
      SIG: HUP
    11. Re:No shit. by MattRog · · Score: 1

      That is a close approximation but fails in a couple, somewhat important, ways:
      1) It assumes your database lives in a discrete file (or series of files). For instance MySQL puts each DB in its' own directory, but postgreSQL stores every user DB in a series of large files (and I don't think you can separate the DBs out).
      2) You have to pause, quiesce, or somehow write lock the database to ensure you have no partial writes.
      3) Generally, unless you copy the *entire* installation directory (namely the system database tables), you cannot load the database into a new server (say if I wanted to do a poor-man's replication by copying and moving the DB over every day or so). If you have only that database, configured identically, then copying the installation may work. However if you have more than one DB you can't.

      --

      Thanks,
      --
      Matt
  60. hmm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    that would seem to get getting fired for gross incompitance, not for choosing Oracle.

    Not to be nitpicking, but it's always amusing when someone mispells incompetence.

    1. Re:hmm... by tealover · · Score: 4, Funny

      ...amusing when someone mispells...

      Is this real irony or Alanis irony?

      --
      -- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
    2. Re:hmm... by MadAhab · · Score: 1

      goddamn i have to clean my guts off the floor, cause my side split over that one. i have to say it's neither. it doesn't smell like real irony. and alanis irony would be more like, oh, i dunno, having a spelling test when you've got your period or something. not that that's a slag (no pun intended) against wimmin, because one look at my record collection would show you how much i respect women. the point is, it's (ed - ironic) a lot like alanis irony, only without the intention of irony that makes it's (ed - still ironic, but not funny this time) non-irony itself a little bit ironic. but it's still ironic. in that kind of "because it's stupid" way.

      --
      Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
  61. Fifth largest? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The article says that the .org domains is the fifth largest TLD. What are the top four? .com and .net (obviously)
    then what? .ca? .uk? .edu?

    1. Re:Fifth largest? by Jadrano · · Score: 4, Informative

      Unfortunately, I haven't found new data, but here is a list of January 2001.
      The top ranks are:
      1. .com: 21,174,751
      2. .net: 2,806,721
      3. .uk: 2,078,474
      4. .de: 1,732,994
      5. .org: 1,614,740
      6. .nl: 416,842
      7. .kr: 325,203
      ...
      The numbers have certainly changed since then, but perhaps the ranks are still similar. Maybe someone has found new data?

    2. Re:Fifth largest? by farnsworth · · Score: 4, Funny
      here are the latest numbers of various tld registrations:

      1) .com ORA-00936: missing expression
      2) .net mySQL:Cannot Connect to Local mysql server
      3) .de Filemaker Pro: 813, Record Synchronization error on network
      4) .org jdbc:postgresql:postgres Exception caught 101, error: Network is unreachable
      5) .nl "errr, I think I have that number scribbled on that big wooden shoe..."
      6) .kr "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!!!!"

      --

      There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.

    3. Re:Fifth largest? by Kashif+Shaikh · · Score: 1

      Personally, I think 20 million of .com are all porn sites. Why don't they just have their own domain altogther? Like .sex?

    4. Re:Fifth largest? by TiMike · · Score: 1

      I'd expect the .kr domain to move upward the quickest due to their broadband explosion.

    5. Re:Fifth largest? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      .nl is one of them

  62. It's not a transition of db's... by sporty · · Score: 1

    .org is also transitioning from verisign to affilias/PIR.

    I think the transition isn't just databases, but also netwokrs.. companies.. infrastructure.

    I'd check to see if affilias isn't also doing .info with postgres.

    --

    -
    ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only

  63. guess backups are not a concern by crm114 · · Score: 0, Interesting

    pg is great, but it still requires a shutdown to perform a backup (pg_dump and dumpall are exports, not backups).

    1. Re:guess backups are not a concern by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Speaking from experience, they are fine backups. And any *good* Oracle DBA that you talk to will tell you that they also dump their tables to text every day for backups too.

    2. Re:guess backups are not a concern by zulux · · Score: 1

      pg is great, but it still requires a shutdown to perform a backup (pg_dump and dumpall are exports, not backups).

      pg_dump works fine on a running database, and guess what: the output of pg_dump contains the entire database in SQL format. Pipe that to gzip and presto, you have a compressed backup file ready for the tape. Automate the who thing with cron and you can have hourly backups.

      --

      Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

    3. Re:guess backups are not a concern by Jadrano · · Score: 1

      Yes, and with pg_dump dumps in different formats are possible, some of which are already compressed.

    4. Re:guess backups are not a concern by Sxooter · · Score: 2, Informative

      That is a bold faced lie. You sir, are a liar.

      pg_dump not only runs WHILE the database is up, it does so in such a way as to ensure completely transactionally pure backups (i.e. snapshots) with virtually no impact on performance.

      And they do so in SQL.

      If you don't know anything about a subject you should keep you mouth shut. You only convince people you're ill informed and ignorant when you post lies.

      --

      --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
  64. Re: your sig... by Lowca · · Score: 1

    :-)

  65. Are you sure about this? by Bigboote66 · · Score: 1
    Oracle will use the index Table(A,B) to locate all A where A=Y, then scan through those rows for B=X. It will not use the full index like you've said. If you want to use the full index, you either need to specify A=Y before B=X

    This doesn't match with my experience. Order of the conditions in a WHERE clause doesn't effect the optimizer. Specifically, in this case, I create a sample million-row table:
    create table foo (col1 integer, col2 integer);
    insert into foo values (1, 1);
    insert into foo select col1, col2 + 1 from foo;
    insert into foo select col1, col2 + 2 from foo;
    insert into foo select col1, col2 + 4 from foo;
    [...]
    insert into foo select col1, col2 + 512 from foo;
    insert into foo select col1 + 1, col2 from foo;
    insert into foo select col1 + 2, col2 from foo;
    insert into foo select col1 + 4, col2 from foo;
    [...]
    insert into foo select col1 + 512, col2 from foo;
    create unique index foo_i on foo (col1, col2);
    analyze table foo compute statistics;
    (I had to fiddle with the above because /.'s lameness filters were being set off)

    I then run two queries, reversing the order of the constraints in the where clause:
    SQL> set autotrace on

    SQL> select * from foo where col1 = 476 and col2 = 717;

    COL1 COL2

    476 717

    Execution Plan

    0 SELECT STATEMENT Optimizer=CHOOSE (Cost=2 Card=1 Bytes=6)
    1 0 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'FOO_I' (UNIQUE) (Cost=2 Card=1 Bytes=6)

    Statistics

    0 recursive calls
    0 db block gets
    3 consistent gets
    0 physical reads
    0 redo size
    262 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
    314 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
    4 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
    0 sorts (memory)
    0 sorts (disk)
    1 rows processed

    SQL> select * from foo where col2 = 717 and col1 = 476;

    COL1 COL2

    476 717

    Execution Plan

    0 SELECT STATEMENT Optimizer=CHOOSE (Cost=2 Card=1 Bytes=6)
    1 0 INDEX (UNIQUE SCAN) OF 'FOO_I' (UNIQUE) (Cost=2 Card=1 Bytes=6)

    Statistics

    0 recursive calls
    0 db block gets
    3 consistent gets
    0 physical reads
    0 redo size
    262 bytes sent via SQL*Net to client
    314 bytes received via SQL*Net from client
    4 SQL*Net roundtrips to/from client
    0 sorts (memory)
    0 sorts (disk)
    1 rows processed
    You can see that the performance of the query is the same in both cases. Am I missing something?

    -BbT
    1. Re:Are you sure about this? by fitten · · Score: 1

      What version of Oracle are you using?

      I no longer work at the place where I did that work but iirc, we were using Oracle8 (one of the lower licensing ones, not Enterprise for sure) there running on a Windows2K server. I do know that Oracle licensing schemes enable certain functionalities with more $$ (like functional indices) and later versions (9i).

    2. Re:Are you sure about this? by Bigboote66 · · Score: 1

      This particular query was run on 8.1.6 Enterprise (Solaris & NT), but I've been working with Oracle since 7.3.4 and we're currently doing 9i. It functions similarly on all of them. It could be that the sub-enterprise releases of Oracle behave differently, but I'm not sure - we were using Personal Oracle on our laptops for our sales staff, and we didn't see any drop in performance once the I/O & CPU were taken into account.

      I'm surpised that Oracle would be advocating bitmaps for everything. We use them a lot, and they're great, but they're not useful for everything, and have particular problem when used on high transaction tables. Plus, some columns (particularly DATE columns) don't lend themselves to bitmaps.

      -BbT

  66. How about the whole IT staff of California? by sideshow · · Score: 1

    A whole bunch of people got fired for choose Oracle, mostly because they choose to buy way more licences then there were employees.

    --

    Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.

  67. We put the ---- in dot-ORG by penguin_punk · · Score: 4, Funny

    Ok. I think I figured it out.

    Microsoft puts the "." in .CA

    Sun puts the "." in .COM

    PostgreSQL puts the "E_fatalError - Database error" in .ORG?

    I have a test on this tomorrow, so I just wanted to make sure.

    laugh.

    --
    HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
    1. Re:We put the ---- in dot-ORG by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      LOL! that gets props.

  68. Why SQL for DNS? by MMHere · · Score: 1

    Why is SQL necessary to support DNS queries?

    Isn't /etc/hosts good enough?

    OK, I know DNS does a little bit more than mapping names (domains) to numbers (IP addresses), but not much.

    Whassup?

    1. Re:Why SQL for DNS? by kobaz · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do you know many thousands of .org domains are out there? With /etc/hosts, when you go to look up a domain name, it loads up /etc/hosts, and checks, line by line if the domain is in there.

      Imagine that your /etc/hosts file has 50,000 hosts in it (which is NOT ALOT, considering the amount of existing domains out there). Now imagine the 2 billion people that are on the internet are hitting your /etc/hosts based nameserver to look up aolsucks.org.
      SQL servers, good ones, do table indexing and cacheing enableing lightning fast lookups even when there are hundreds of thousands of people accessing database (assumeing a fast enough server).

      DNS does ALOT more then just mapping names to numbers. If you are interested head over to the dns rfc over here

      --

      The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
    2. Re:Why SQL for DNS? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is not about DNS. It is about domain info.
      For whois etc.

  69. Re:Nice. But who is supporting? - PostgreSQL, Inc. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    PostgreSQL Inc. offers excellent support contract options, enterprise software additions (replication!), and traning, etc. for PostgreSQL. Check them out at:
    http://www.pgsql.com/

  70. As A Person Who Might Have Smoked Crack... by Petersko · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...I can tell you without question that none of the effects associated with crack include the forming of erroneous conclusions regarding the current state of database field testing.

    Marijuana, on the other hand, allowed me to accept such conclusions as valid, mostly because I was too lazy to doublecheck.

  71. Sorry by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    for my post about mcdougal, which may not be spelled correctly).

    God have mercy on us.

  72. Speaking of .ORG... by slykens · · Score: 1
    The fucktards at Network Solutions sent out an email the other day titled "Notice: Update .ORG Registry Transition". Spamassassin caught it but I looked into it a little closer. Some keyboard monkey sent out a list of several hundred email addresses instead of an actual email.

    What is sad is that I trust these people with my domain information. Maybe I'll move my domains this year. Register.com seems like a good operation.

    1. Re:Speaking of .ORG... by quantum+bit · · Score: 2, Informative

      Check out DirectNIC.

      I don't work for them or know anybody who does, but I've had all my domains on there for a couple years (after getting fed up with Networ... uh I mean Verisi... uh I mean Network Solutions) and have been very happy with the price and performance. Quick and clean management interface.

    2. Re:Speaking of .ORG... by BlacKat · · Score: 1

      Several hundred?! You got lucky then...

      I got a 1.82mb email containing 86,270 addresss... no that's not a typo. Eighty-Six THOUSAND addresses!

      Guess I got a free mailing list containig a pretty high ratio of "good" addresses... sigh, sadly my own email addy was in there so now that I am not longer dealing with Network Solutions I will set the address to bounce everything.

  73. Re:Great idea... take another puff, reread, unwind by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Cause it was a joke, they are the tld for dot org, right? So should it break, where do they get updates from? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it? postgresql dot org. But how do they get to postgresql dot org? They first use dns to find out where postgresql dot org is located. And who is the top level domain server for dot org? Well they are? And are they running? No they're broken, that was the given assumption. So what do they do? Well they need an update. And where do they get it?

  74. Don't try to rest on performance by Jayson · · Score: 1

    You shouldn't put too much in performance numbers, scalability, query language, procedure language, or administration tools (they aren't even close in some of these). Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL are anywhere near the top. You need to make an argument based on price (and even then, most companies would rather drop $50,000 or more on a better database).

  75. Re:Recent benchmarks comparing PostgreSQL to MySQL by Sxooter · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The problem is it's hard to find a fair benchmark. Most SQL bencharks won't run on MySQL because it's missing so many features.

    Postgresql can be tested by the OSDB suite found on source forge. It does well. But the most important benchmark is how well it runs YOUR query load. And no one other than you can benchmark that.

    The real issue is how a database behaves under changing load conditions. How do both databases perform when you write once per second? What about 5 writes a second, 10 writes a second? Some database have serious contention issues between writes and reads.

    Postgresql uses MVCC to reduce the contention to about zero on things like content management systems and what not. Which means it behaves well as write frequency increases. Try it and benchmark it for your load, it's the only way you can actually know.

    --

    --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
  76. and hot backups of MySQL with innodb is not free. by Sxooter · · Score: 1

    Oh, and it costs $1000 for a perpetual license to update a mysql database running on innodb hot.

    --

    --- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
  77. On competing SQLs and performance by The+Gline · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I run a text-chat site that is -- please don't lynch me -- based on Win2K and MS SQL Server. The site does about 10-12 DB transactions a second on a slow day and about 100-150/sec on a fast day. At peak hours we have something like 30% CPU usage on the average (it's a 700 Mhz box, not bleeding-edge).

    A friend of mine put someone in touch with me who was trying to build a vaguely similar system and was having no end of problems. Transactions were timing out left and right, and his machine was more than twice as fast as mine. From his experiences -- and from what I've seen in a lot of parallel setups -- there is a difference between being able to code something functional and being able to code something that functions intelligently. I'd learned a lot of ways to cut down massively on system overhead -- use stored procedures, turn off locks when they're not required, don't use transactions unless they're absolutely needed, etc., etc. -- and all of them add up and pay off.

    As far as PostgreSQL goes, it's probably going to depend on how good a job they do coding it into their system. If they do it well, I'd imagine PostgreSQL is gonna be quite solid. If they do it like idiots, not even the best database solution in the world -- not Oracle, nothing -- is going to save them.

    Heck, even Oracle is going to break if you try to fetch a billion rows at once; the trick is to find smarter ways to partition and subdivide the data, to cut down the amount of time needed for every little step on the way. (I found out that adding ONE index in my system sped things up by about 30% alone, an index I would not have realized I needed until I ran a performance profile.)

    Let's see how well they do before we sling tomatoes, OK?

    --
    Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
    1. Re:On competing SQLs and performance by Malcontent · · Score: 1

      Last I checked SQL server was running something like twelve thousand dollars per processor. I hope you were making some serious bucks on that web site to justify that kind of expense.

      --

      War is necrophilia.

    2. Re:On competing SQLs and performance by The+Gline · · Score: 1

      Standard edition is $5K list per processor; it's much less than that in stores. I saved my pennies. :)

      --
      Honorary Member of Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Process Servers
    3. Re:On competing SQLs and performance by Malcontent · · Score: 1

      Looks like they dropped the price. I guess all that competition from free databases is making a big impact on SQL server. Dropping from 12K to 5K is a big deal. I suspect that they will have to drop it some more pretty soon after all interbase, sapdb, postgresql, mysql etc are getting better every day and most of them can already do 90% of what sql server does for free.

      Anything that slows down the flow of money to Bill Gates is fine by me.

      --

      War is necrophilia.

  78. Typical slashdot comment... by eniu!uine · · Score: 1

    Now I know why I haven't read rfc 1035. I do thank you because it's been a while since I've seen an ASCII diagram. This easily takes the place of my compiler design book for most boring information ever sifted through.

    If they can make 'master files' a cube, then everything should be a cube.. I don't see why user program has to be a square.

  79. Re:Nice. But who is supporting? - PostgreSQL, Inc. by rycamor · · Score: 1

    Why on earth was this modded "funny"? It's actually true.

  80. This is what they are using it for by Johannes · · Score: 1

    PostgreSQL comes into play here at the registry. In this case Afilias. They are the authoritative source for all registrations in the .org domain (or will be soon, I'm not sure the exact date). You may recognize them as the registry for .info as well. All of the DNS infrastructure will be run by UltraDNS and they run Oracle. You may recognize them as the DNS infrastructure provider for .info. I'm assuming that .org will work the same as .info (since it's the same registry and same DNS server infrastructure) and if so, all changes are incremental and near realtime.

  81. Overpricedacle by digitaltraveller · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One of the PostgreSQL developers is at Linux.conf.au right now. During his talk on Wednesday he mentioned this and that Oracle accused the .org registry guys of "criminial negligence" if they switched to PostgreSQL over Oracle. All I can say is: "HAH!" Feeling the pressure...

  82. Uh yea, it's cold by pyite · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Woke up this morning around 8:00 with every expectation of going to LinuxWorld. In fact, I'm staring at my admission badge right now. However, it's cold. It's very cold. And the thought of waiting for a train and walking several blocks from Penn station to Javitz made me chicken out. I would have liked to have gone, but maybe next year.

    --

    "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman

  83. whatever by exspecto · · Score: 0

    we don't even need friggin dns anyways. you'd learn a lot more and have more fun if you just typed in random ip addresses. and it would be even more fun if everyone had a dynamic ip.

    try incorporating http://198.247.175.96 into a limmerick or poem

    1. Re:whatever by exspecto · · Score: 0

      ermm...someone clue me in as to why goatse resolves to above address, but clicking on above address does not goto goatse...

  84. That makes sense. by Jayson · · Score: 1

    There really isn't any performance or load issues, so PostgreSQL is just something that work. I would imagine that MySQL would also work just as well in this situation, too.

  85. Hey, the signs are still in the building... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    At least last time I noticed them. I live two blocks away.

  86. benchmarks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    OK, I'll share some very vague and general benchmark results...

    I did an informal benchmark on "enterprise level" queries when PostGreSQL 7.2 came out, and found that PostGreSQL came within a third of Oracle's speed on hash joins and within half of Oracle's speed on sorts, both on DSS type queries. Not bad at all for free, but not a cost-effective replacement for Oracle either.

    From what I understand, Oracle stores numeric data in such a way that a straight byte-compare will return the proper order, and it looked to me like PostGreSQL was doing conversions for every compare. Oracle's hash joins are just mind-blowingly fast. Other operations are mind-numbingly slow.

    Note however this is meaningless; Oracle performs differently on different hardware (this was Tru64/Alpha stuff) and different versions (8,8i,9i) can perform very differently on the same hardware.

    There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.

  87. Lighten up by 0x0d0a · · Score: 1

    So maybe he doesn't work in a DNS-related job, you know?

    Like, I expect there are plenty of your own comments that are wrong or stupid because you haven't read every single TLD.

    *Maybe* your complaining would be legitimate (though still not polite) on a DNS mailing list. It's out of line on Slashdot, however, which is at best a general tech forum.

  88. Oracle bigotry by 0x0d0a · · Score: 1

    It's because people who paid out tons of money for Oracle are like people who paid out tons of money for a Ferrari or Scientology -- they feel vaguely unsure that they made the right decision and need to keep vocally defending it to everyone within range.

    I'd say there's little reason for 98% of Oracle licenses.

  89. Re: good point, but ... by brokeninside · · Score: 1
    SQL servers, good ones, do table indexing and cacheing enableing lightning fast lookups even when there are hundreds of thousands of people accessing database (assumeing a fast enough server).
    Presumably the DNS software could also index and cache the data enabling lighting fast lookups even when there are hundreds of thousands of people accessing the database.
  90. Kinda expensive, don't you think? by tshak · · Score: 1

    $30 million POS systems

    That's a lot of money to spend on a POS!

    --

    There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
  91. accountability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This brings up the issue of accountability. With Open Source applications, who writes patches when things go wrong? Sometimes, after putting the application into your environment, you could be doing things with that the developers never thought to test. At my organization, we use Oracle and are currently experiencing a bizarre problem. The database is creating these huge trace files that we send to Oracle for analysis and for them to write a patch. We have NDAs with Oracle so we send these files off. What would we do if this was an Open Source solution? Where do we send these trace files now? What if the information is sensitive/confidential? Are patches issued with the same urgency as if we were paying expensive contracts?

  92. Re:Gee... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's because the slash is written in perl/mysql instead of ocaml/postgresql

  93. Re:Recent benchmarks comparing PostgreSQL to MySQL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Why isn't that fair? Complete failures are among the most valuable benchmark results.

    If I claim I've made a RDBMS using echo>> and grep|cut|sort, do we suddenly need a new benchmark that only ever does SELECT and INSERT on one table?

  94. Re: good point, but ... by kobaz · · Score: 1

    My point wasnt that SQL was *required* for dns, it just makes it super easy. Sure, bind doesn't use SQL and it works perfectly fine (although management is hell with thousands of domains).

    My argument was that a purly /etc/hosts style nameserver is a BAD IDEA. :)

    --

    The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
  95. Other what? by Jayson · · Score: 1

    Other column-oriented databases? Yes, there is Sybase IQM and Alterian. Sometimes they are mistakenly called tokenized dabatases, but is that a misnomer (it is really an orthogonal feature as Aruna shows being a tokenized databased, but not column-oriented). KDB is the fastest, smallest, and simpliest though (most of the time this simplicity is good, but sometimes it is bad). I don't know of any free versions. It might make a good project, since they are (I think) conceptually easier than the standard row-oriented B-Tree based systems.

    Here is an older article on KDB and a high-level view of some of the tricks that it uses: Kx Systems: The Lord Nelson Of Software Companies?

  96. OT, but your .sig is sweet by Dave_bsr · · Score: 1

    As a fellow VI'er who's pushed :Wq way too many times, your sig is cool.

    --


    Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?