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.

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: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.

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