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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."
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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.
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.
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".
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
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.
/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. :-)
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
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
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.
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?
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.
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.
/. non-profit?
So Slashdot is Non-Commercial? I don't know. Is non-commercial the same as non-profit, is
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
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.
Shame on Google.
"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.
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?
"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
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...
The article says that the .org domains is the fifth largest TLD. What are the top four? .com and .net (obviously) .ca? .uk? .edu?
then what?
pg is great, but it still requires a shutdown to perform a backup (pg_dump and dumpall are exports, not backups).
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.
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...
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.
.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).
The Affilias
Rod Taylor