PostgreSQL 8.0 Enters Beta

gavinroy writes "As announced in pgsql-announce, PostgreSQL 8.0 Beta is now available. New features include native win32 support, Point in Time Recovery, Tablespaces, and much more! here is the beta history if you want more information."

Comments

Can it Compete with Oracle or DB2?

[Greyfox]

I was interviewing with a company a while back that was planning to move from an Oracle based set-up to a Postgres based one. They were pushing enough data around daily that they were having to redesign their collector software to be more efficient, so I was somewhat concerned that Postgres wouldn't give them the performance they needed, but I haven't really seen enough of it to be able to comment.

On the other hand, I've seen both Oracle and DB2 corrupt indexes and database table data in various circumstances (Usually the failing of a DBA in some capacity or other.) I'd be curious to see how the various databases stack up against each other without the hype that most of the parties that publish such studies usually bring to the table.

Re:Can it Compete with Oracle or DB2?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the fakest answer in all of IT.

We had problems with MS IIS servers at a big financial services company - did they help us? No
Did we have the premium "MS fucked us so hard, we got a plaque for it" service/support contract? Yes.
Did we sue them? No fucking way.

Has any major software company ever been sued over the bugs or failures or problems caused by their software?

If it has happened, it is nowhere near the rate of problems that their software has caused.

I'd like to slap the shit out of the next idiot IT manager I hear say this kind of crap - we can't use that, we need to have someone we can sue...

Yeah, right except what really happens is that after their crappy software doesn't function the way it was promised, I get to work a holiday weekend to fix it while you golf with the assholes who sold it to us.
Same goes for EDS, Accent>ure, KPMG and the rest of those money holes. Gore (as in Gore-tex) was the only one who had the guts to say what every corporate IT slave knows - the emperors of the corporate systems world have no clothes

Native Win support - awesome

[Stone316]

I think this was a major stumbling block for postgreSQL's adoption. I'd love to use it here at work for some small projects but unfortunately were getting more and more windows servers. PITR recovery is a must for any production database these days. Maybe there are some 3rd party packages but I don't think mysql supports this yet. This is great news and I hope it spurs a new round of adoption for pgsql!

Windows support

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Windows support is the only reason MySQL is so popular. PostgreSQL has always been ahead of MySQL in terms of everything but speed. But everybody is familiar with MySQL because, when you want to pick something up, you pick the one that will work with your system, and most people are on Windows.

Up until this point, you have had to install hundreds of MB of cygwin to get PostgreSQL to work on Windows. I think it's a little late to usurp MySQL's market share, especially as MySQL is now entrenched in the cheap web hosting market, but at least PostgreSQL might get the respect it deserves.

Some nice performance enhancements

[grunt107]

The cross-datatype comparison indexing is very important (ex. '1' = 1), as well as index usage on OR clauses. Both of these before would cause full table scans, which is very costly on VLDBs (Very Large DataBases).
The improvement to the VACUUM I/O processor is important for Postgre to be used on a multi-app server. The 'play nice' feature will allow one server to house the DB AND web servers (albeit at a performance hit to the DB processes).
Overall, a nice improvement.

Thank you Fujitsu And Afilias.

[ron_ivi]

I just wanted to say thanks to Fujitsu for helping pay for this

Fujitsu foots the bill for new PostgreSQL database features
Thursday July 01, 2004 (07:04 AM GMT)
...
Berkus described the new Fujitsu-formed features as follows:

* Tablespaces is a means of partitioning large amounts of data easily and efficiently on separate storage devices, a key requirement for maintaining PostgreSQL's performance on large databases in the hundreds of gigabytes, and terabyte range;
* Nested Transactions allows application developers a very granular level of control over database commits and rollbacks, which is particularly significant for maintaining data integrity and porting applications from other database platforms;
* Robust support for stored procedures in Java that exceeds the goals of the SQLJ specification in the ANSI SQL99 standard.

And thanks to Afilias (the guys who run the .org domain) - from the same article:

More recently, .org and .info domain registry company Afilias has sponsored developer Jan Wieck to work full time on developing a new, enterprise-class replication system for PostgreSQL called Slony-I, to be presented next month at OSCON in Portland, Ore.

Re:Thank you Fujitsu And Afilias.

[Earlybird]

• More recently, .org and .info domain registry company Afilias has sponsored developer Jan Wieck to work full time on developing a new, enterprise-class replication system for PostgreSQL called Slony-I, to be presented next month at OSCON in Portland, Ore.

Except Slony-I is a single-master/multiple-slave replication system -- hardly "enterprise-class".

What's slightly noteworthy about Slony is that it has "switchover" support. If the master fails, one of the slaves become the master.

Of course, since Slony's replication is asynchronous, it means that at the point of switchover, slaves might not have received all pending changes, thus becoming out of sync with the master. Unfortunately, Slony doesn't really address this problem.

The design overview is useful reading, if rather confusing; the writer's first language is probably not English.

Re:Thank you Fujitsu And Afilias.

[boneshintai]

Strongly disagree.

The PostgreSQL website is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes. Links to anything most users will need -- downloads, docs, and search -- are right at the top of every page.

The MySQL website uses microfonts, and good luck finding documentation without resorting to google site:mysql.com; there's links to it on some pages and not others, and most notably not on the front page. The MySQL website is, apparently, trying to be oracle.com, only worse.

The difference is pretty simple: The postgresql developers are trying to write a database server. Selling it is not their concern, nor is marketing it to the world: they let others (mostly, their users) do that while they focus on development. MySQL, on the other hand, is a business: they need customers to survive, and sometimes the technology takes a back seat to the business side of things.

Re:I recommend Mysql users to take a look at PG

[Svennig]

Okay, I'll bite

Stored Procedures. They arent functions. Functions are different. Functions should be called inline, from within SQL statements. There should be a difference.

When looking towards migrating to an OSS database from MS SQL Server I looked into how easy it was to use the postgres stored procedure/functions/things. I couldn't find any equivalent of returing a resultset. In MS SQL you use:

CREATE PROCEDURE name AS select * from test

The only way that I could find to do that in postgres was:

1. Return a cursor reference, in which case throuch JDBC you need to obtain this horrid postgres specific class from the driver.
2. Return a set of results (or was it records, my mind fails me), but I couldn't get this to work
3. Return a set of created types, but this doesnt work well for dynamic queries and makes maintainance a headache - you'd end up defining hundreds of types!

4. So it seems that we're stuck with MS SQL server.

   If someone DOES know how to do this is a non-evil manner, please tell me! Were planning on doing an upgrade, and I'd rather not have to fork out the money for SQL Server licences etc...

replication is not a failover solution

[RelliK]

PostgreSQL supports replication BUT replication is absolutely useless as a failover mechanism because it is asynchronous. That is, when you commit a transaction, you cannnot be sure if/when it gets propagated to the slaves. For true failover you need distributed transactions. Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL support them, but curiously, Firebird does.

P.I.T.R

[blooba]

Point-In-Time Recovery is extremely important, and was the one major factor that prevented me from seriously considering PostgreSQL in a production environment. However, please bear in mind that such a feature requires extensive testing, i.e., crashing your db in every conceivable way, and then recovering it quickly AND consistently (in consistent mode.) So I will still wait and see about this feature.

Tablespaces are also a key feature. The nicest thing about tablespaces is: each schema can have its own tablespace. This makes maintenance much, much easier, allowing you to isolate the data for each of multiple applications or developers. You can also use it to isolate mission-critical data within the same schema, which in many cases can keep your app running, even if you lose a non-critical portion of your database.

Savepoints are nice, but I've never had to use them. And altering column data types is nifty, but not really useful in the real world.

Btw, does PostgreSQL have row-level locking yet?

Re:not yet on par with MySQL

[Bromrrrrr]

..Mysql is more friendly towards programmers.

Are you kidding me? If you like to do everything in your app that _should_ have been handled by the DBMS then yeah, sure :)....MySQL is more friendly to the programmer who hasn't got a clue about databases maybe, if you know what a real DBMS can do it becomes a pain in the ass to work with.

you can't have a DBMS which makes both happy: there are opposing roles.

Well, I don't think I'd agree with that, but if anything I'd say MySQL is the easier one to administer. Postgres needs a lot more thought with regards to tuning and user management.

Especially user management in Postgres is, in my view, horrible and a lot better in MySQL. Well, can't have it all I guess :) I'd still take Postges over MySQL any day.

Windows Native Support

[adolfojp]

I believe that native windows support for PostgreSQL is essential, not necesarily to deploy apps in that enviroment but to test and develop them. When I started using MySQL on my windows box, I had also looked into PostgreSQL. The lack of windows binaries for PostgreSQL made MySQL the default choice for me. On features alone PostgreSQL wins hand down. Also, in my experience, the faster performance of MySQL over PostgreSQL dissapears when I use InnoDB tables for transactional data processing. The doors to PostgreSQL have been open to many developers stuck in the windows world. Perhaps I will try PostgreSQL for my ASP.NET apps in addition to my trusty MySQL.

Cheers
Adolfo