Oracle and PostgreSQL Debate

Mark Brunelli writes DBAs are talking about the merits of the open source PostgreSQL database management system (DBMS) as compared to Oracle - and their opinions truly run the gamut. DBAs responding to the interview said they liked the low cost and ease of use of the open source database, while others said that Oracle's rich feature cannot be ignored. Still others talked about how well the two systems play together. According to one DBA, a gateway product from Oracle would be a welcome offering."

Comments

Corrections to the article

[einhverfr]

I too have been using PostgreSQL since 6.5. I have experience with every version from 6.5 to the current 8.1....

The article made a number of mistakes or maybe the interviewees were not that knowledgable:

Jim Allen, a longtime Oracle professional and an independent technology consultant, says he has had considerable experience with PostgreSQL 7.4 and 7.5, but not the newest version, 8.0.

7.5 never existed. It was renamed to 8.0 shortly before entering beta. Goes to show how little he knows-- like those people who used to call and ask for tech support for "Windows 97" except a DBA should know better....

On the other hand, Allen was unimpressed by the fact that in PostgreSQL, stored procedure parameters are not typed.

"Everything is passed as strings, even integer arrays," he said.

Huh??? This is plainly incorrect and has been since I have been working on stored procs in it (at least 7.0, maybe 6.5 or earlier). All parameters are typed. They may, however, be presented as text depending on the function and how it is called.

PostgreSQL doesn't behave as nicely as Oracle when the system fills up, Goulet said. In those instances, the system tends to crash quickly.

I assume he is talking about oid/xid wraparound issues. Oid wraparounds fail pretty gracefully. In 8.1, you will get plenty of warnings before the xid wraparound forces a crash. However the crash is there as a safety measure to protect your data-- if the xid was allowed to wraparound, previously committed transactions would become invisible.

The solution to the xid wraparound is simply to do regular mainetnance. With 8.1 the autovacuum capability is integrated into the database backend and so this should never be a problem.

Goulet said that setting up a TCP/IP connection capability with PostgreSQL is hardly an intuitive process. To do it, he says, one needs to modify the postgres.conf and pg_hba.conf files manually.

Prior to 7.4 I think this was the case. With 8.0 and 8.1, only the pg_hba.conf needs to be enabled though you *might* also want to allow the system to listen on addresses other than localhost. In this case, you might need to alter both files.

But then there are webmin plugins etc. that allow you to modify the pg_hba entries from a web interface :-)