How about get a real computer so she can learn to program?
You can get one from ZaReason: http://zareason.com/ in the USA and http://zareason.co.nz/ in New Zealand. You are not limited to Ubuntu, you can also get Fedora, and other Linux distributions preloaded.
The major benefits of Linux is that nothing is hidden from you, and there are plenty of free applications - including those dealing with mathematics and science. Also you don't need to get anti-virus software.
For beginners programming, I recommend Python - one of many free programming languages. Even if she never wants to write her own application, programming is good for learning mathematics.
Remember most mobile devices such as Android phones and eBooks are based on Linux - not to mention Linux is also used on servers & supercomputers.
Hmm... the above is wrong (an all too common mistake), correct is either: "Corporations are composed of many people" or "Corporations comprise many people"
I would _NEVER_ say that "the computer has zero tolerance for sloppiness"! When I was at University in the early 1970's, a friend brought to me my FORTRAN coding sheet (less than 30 lines of code), cards, and print out - there were 3 glaring errors and yet the program still managed to produce some reasonable output!
I am 61, and certainly not the oldest still programming. My first 2 paid programming positions involved FORTRAN IV and COBOL, I now use Java. Recently I've played with Python and Groovy.
A few years ago I met a young man in his mid twenties, who said he was too old to learn programming!
I wrote my first program (in BASIC) when I was eighteen, to display what happens when you feed the sine function complex numbers - I did it for fun. The computer was the size of a 4 draw filing cabinet, and had about 4K bytes - not 4 megabytes, nor 4 gigabytes! Now my main development machine has 16 gigabytes.
Currently I am writing a system to to store, retrieve, and display tagged images using Java on Linux. The full system will be backed by a Postgres database and will be accessed by a web front end.
For many things people find the GIMP sufficient and considerably cheaper than Photoshop, and LibreOffice is not only free but far easier to use than MS Office.
Not to mention the savings of time and money brought about by the better security and the lack of need for anti virus on Linux based systems.
Yes GNOME 3 is a tragedy, I keep thinking 'what were they smoking?' and 'such deliberate sabotage!'. Fortunately, xfce can be made to be almost as good as GNOME 2 - unfortunately, GNOME seems to have nobbled the Nautilus file manager.
However, you can still get a GUI on Linux that is significantly better than anything Microsoft is prepared to offer you. For example I have 25 virtual desktops on my Linux box (Fedora 16), try doing that on any Microsoft O/S!
The positron was predicted because the equation of the electron had 2 solutions of opposite sign - a few years later the positron was actually discovered.
So when any mathematics suggestions solutions that have not been found yet, then physicists are interested, but they fairly carefully consider if the solutions are possible - sometimes fundamental assumptions need to be carefully re-examined.
I had to do some DBA stuff for a MySQL database for a project involving sales tax in the USA, and I support a web site that uses MySQL (I set up my own development environment to test it, from scratch). Performance was not a problem in either, as far as I know.
However, I do find PostgreSQL easier to set up and to write SQL for.
I have also spoken to a senior developer for http://digg.com/ about how they implemented their distributed database using MySQL - he liked PostgreSQL, but at the time it did not support master & multiple slaves (or some such). So I am aware that MySQL can handle really large transaction rates.
Though I would never recommend MySQL for really critical data, at least with my current knowledge of MySQL.
What I am interested in, is finding reliable performance comparisons between MySQL and PostgreSQL. So when you claimed MySQL performed better than PostgreSQL I was interested, as that goes against what I know.
So it is not a case of "I like PostgreSQL, therefore MySQL must be no good!"! I have also experience in Oracle, Sybase, and PROGRESS (plus at least a couple of others that I don't remember), but I find PostgreSQL easier than them. I will use whatever database is appropriate for a project, or accept whatever has been chosen - so I cannot afford to be too dogmatic.
Out of the box, PostgreSQL has values for memory usage and other tuneables that are too small for production use on modern server configurations. So comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL with default settings may well lead to erroneous performance conclusions.
I used to consider myself adequately qualified to set up a reasonably tuned PostgreSQL installations - I then made the mistake of reading the PostgreSQL mailing lists!:-)
Now I know enough to safely improve the performance to some extent, but I would be more cautious about some of the tuning, as some tuning variables are very dependent on: 1. precise nature of your workload 2. operating system 3. amount of RAM 4. number of processor cores 5. number of disks 6. and many other factors 7. not to mention interaction of the above with each other!
Unfortunately, for the best tuning, it depends... There is no one set of tuning changes valid for all workloads, even for identical O/S & hardware configurations.
Fortunately PostgreSQL allows some things to be tuned not only for the installation as a whole, but also: per database, per user, per session - and for some things, for a specific transaction.
Be aware also that some usage idioms are MySQL specific, and PostgreSQL may well have alternative approaches to produce the equivalent results more efficiently. This affects not only the SQL used in a query, but also in the types of fields. Note that PostgreSQL is much more standards conformant than MySQL.
Even if PostgreSQL and MySQL had comparable performance and ease of development, I would still chose PostgreSQL for its greater reliability.
I would be interested, in you comparing the PostgreSQL and MySQL (should you have the time & inclination!), after both have been tuned to a reasonable extent. I suspect that you will find that then PostgreSQL will outperform MySQL for your workload - even with your older version of PostgreSQL.
You said previously: "it might be that PostgreSQL is better performant etc. It just happens that for my use case it doesn't" I was wondering why that would be the case, as that appears contrary to what I have read - especiall since Postgres 9.2 has been released.
Seems difficult to get up to date meanigful performance comparisons, probably because Microsoft's licence forbids it unless they approve!
As to which is better... it depends!
I strongly suspect that given a fixed budget and starting from scratch buying new hardware: one wouild get more transactions per second using PostgreSQL & Linux over SQL Server & Microsoft O/S. Howver, I suspect that on the same hardware, PostgreSQL would be faster as then you can use Linux whereas SQL Server is limited to a Microsoft O/S.
Two other quick bits of info around PostgreSQL and scalability. You can see some of the current benchmarks here: Scalability, in Graphical Form, Analyzed. As far as other scalable companies using PostgreSQL – Instagram have recently published how they scale with PostgreSQL.
TL;DR version: Benchmarks show PostgreSQL 9.1 scaling up to around 45,000 transactions per second with 9.2s code base edging past the 200,000 TPS mark....
David, Wed Apr 11, 2012 at 10:07 pm
completely changed my perspective on postgre, I always thought it was junk. Any leads on a VM to fool around with ? [...]
Over many years of using both, here is what I have found:
For applications with plenty of hardware and few users, the two are very comparable for performance. As concurrency grows, PostgreSQL seems to handle it better, likely due to its MVCC model using disk in the existing data files. However, if the data file run out of room, it can be slower expanding used storage than SQL server. Keep your free space maps big enough, and your vacuums frequent enough to deal with it, and it is great.
The other time when it really seems to shine is when starved for hardware. PostgreSQL seems to deal much better with all of the CPU's being at 100% and swap going like mad trying to keep up. Remember also that I have always used PostgreSQL on Linux or BSD, so some of this may be how the operating systems handle different loads. [...]
We were dealing with integers, or at least with non-fractional numbers - this was 40 years ago, so my recollection is a bit vague as to the other details!
We were never attempting to prove that 1 + 1 does not equal zero, just requiring that to be the case (in the sense that no claim of theorem validity was was made when 1 + 1 equaled zero ).
I am well aware that in the group (+, 0, 1), that 1 + 1 = 0. Similarly for the field (+, x, 0, 1). Sorry don't recall the formal mathematical notation used.
Slashdot Mirror
How about get a real computer so she can learn to program?
You can get one from ZaReason: http://zareason.com/ in the USA and http://zareason.co.nz/ in New Zealand. You are not limited to Ubuntu, you can also get Fedora, and other Linux distributions preloaded.
The major benefits of Linux is that nothing is hidden from you, and there are plenty of free applications - including those dealing with mathematics and science. Also you don't need to get anti-virus software.
For beginners programming, I recommend Python - one of many free programming languages. Even if she never wants to write her own application, programming is good for learning mathematics.
Remember most mobile devices such as Android phones and eBooks are based on Linux - not to mention Linux is also used on servers & supercomputers.
"Corporations are comprised of many people"
Hmm... the above is wrong (an all too common mistake), correct is either:
"Corporations are composed of many people"
or
"Corporations comprise many people"
Hmm...
I would _NEVER_ say that "the computer has zero tolerance for sloppiness"! When I was at University in the early 1970's, a friend brought to me my FORTRAN coding sheet (less than 30 lines of code), cards, and print out - there were 3 glaring errors and yet the program still managed to produce some reasonable output!
I am 61, and certainly not the oldest still programming. My first 2 paid programming positions involved FORTRAN IV and COBOL, I now use Java. Recently I've played with Python and Groovy.
A few years ago I met a young man in his mid twenties, who said he was too old to learn programming!
I wrote my first program (in BASIC) when I was eighteen, to display what happens when you feed the sine function complex numbers - I did it for fun. The computer was the size of a 4 draw filing cabinet, and had about 4K bytes - not 4 megabytes, nor 4 gigabytes! Now my main development machine has 16 gigabytes.
Currently I am writing a system to to store, retrieve, and display tagged images using Java on Linux. The full system will be backed by a Postgres database and will be accessed by a web front end.
(-: :-)
Earthquake risk is _NEVER_ non-zero!
In Christchurch in New Zealand, a fault line moved that had not been known about.
-startup
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.2.0.v20110502.jar
--launcher.library
plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.gtk.linux.x86_64_1.1.100.v20110505
-product
org.eclipse.epp.package.jee.product
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-showsplash
org.eclipse.platform
--launcher.XXMaxPermSize
256m
--launcher.defaultAction
openFile
-vmargs
-Dosgi.requiredJavaVersion=1.5
-XX:+UseParallelGC
-XX:ParallelGCThreads=2
-Duser.name=”XXX Y. ZZZ”
-XX:MaxPermSize=512m
-Xms2g
-Xmx2g
For many things people find the GIMP sufficient and considerably cheaper than Photoshop, and LibreOffice is not only free but far easier to use than MS Office.
Not to mention the savings of time and money brought about by the better security and the lack of need for anti virus on Linux based systems.
Yes GNOME 3 is a tragedy, I keep thinking 'what were they smoking?' and 'such deliberate sabotage!'. Fortunately, xfce can be made to be almost as good as GNOME 2 - unfortunately, GNOME seems to have nobbled the Nautilus file manager.
However, you can still get a GUI on Linux that is significantly better than anything Microsoft is prepared to offer you. For example I have 25 virtual desktops on my Linux box (Fedora 16), try doing that on any Microsoft O/S!
Hmm...
Android uses a modified Linux kernel, and other Linux distributions (Like Fedora) modify the Linux kernel. So it it not Android versus Linux!
Nah!
Your'e wrong!!
The 0's go to the top of the page, and the 1's to the bottom!!!
(As the 0's have air bubbles that make them float...)
[An irrelevant irrelevancy?]
Sinclair Spectrum?
I can access the link in Auckland, New Zealand.
But, but, ... I got told my smart phone is as powerful as the early supercomputers!
The positron was predicted because the equation of the electron had 2 solutions of opposite sign - a few years later the positron was actually discovered.
So when any mathematics suggestions solutions that have not been found yet, then physicists are interested, but they fairly carefully consider if the solutions are possible - sometimes fundamental assumptions need to be carefully re-examined.
"Oddly, management tends to take the possibility of losing funding very, very seriously."
Why?
You stated that MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL - I simply want to find out on what basis to you made that statement.
In this regard - which database I like best is not relevant.
However, you appear to be very unwilling to substantiate your claim in any meaningful manner.
I had to do some DBA stuff for a MySQL database for a project involving sales tax in the USA, and I support a web site that uses MySQL (I set up my own development environment to test it, from scratch). Performance was not a problem in either, as far as I know.
However, I do find PostgreSQL easier to set up and to write SQL for.
I have also spoken to a senior developer for http://digg.com/ about how they implemented their distributed database using MySQL - he liked PostgreSQL, but at the time it did not support master & multiple slaves (or some such). So I am aware that MySQL can handle really large transaction rates.
Though I would never recommend MySQL for really critical data, at least with my current knowledge of MySQL.
What I am interested in, is finding reliable performance comparisons between MySQL and PostgreSQL. So when you claimed MySQL performed better than PostgreSQL I was interested, as that goes against what I know.
So it is not a case of "I like PostgreSQL, therefore MySQL must be no good!"! I have also experience in Oracle, Sybase, and PROGRESS (plus at least a couple of others that I don't remember), but I find PostgreSQL easier than them. I will use whatever database is appropriate for a project, or accept whatever has been chosen - so I cannot afford to be too dogmatic.
Hence my attempt to obtain more info from you.
Out of the box, PostgreSQL has values for memory usage and other tuneables that are too small for production use on modern server configurations. So comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL with default settings may well lead to erroneous performance conclusions.
I used to consider myself adequately qualified to set up a reasonably tuned PostgreSQL installations - I then made the mistake of reading the PostgreSQL mailing lists! :-)
Now I know enough to safely improve the performance to some extent, but I would be more cautious about some of the tuning, as some tuning variables are very dependent on:
1. precise nature of your workload
2. operating system
3. amount of RAM
4. number of processor cores
5. number of disks
6. and many other factors
7. not to mention interaction of the above with each other!
Unfortunately, for the best tuning, it depends... There is no one set of tuning changes valid for all workloads, even for identical O/S & hardware configurations.
Fortunately PostgreSQL allows some things to be tuned not only for the installation as a whole, but also: per database, per user, per session - and for some things, for a specific transaction.
Be aware also that some usage idioms are MySQL specific, and PostgreSQL may well have alternative approaches to produce the equivalent results more efficiently. This affects not only the SQL used in a query, but also in the types of fields. Note that PostgreSQL is much more standards conformant than MySQL.
Even if PostgreSQL and MySQL had comparable performance and ease of development, I would still chose PostgreSQL for its greater reliability.
I would be interested, in you comparing the PostgreSQL and MySQL (should you have the time & inclination!), after both have been tuned to a reasonable extent. I suspect that you will find that then PostgreSQL will outperform MySQL for your workload - even with your older version of PostgreSQL.
You said previously:
"it might be that PostgreSQL is better performant etc. It just happens that for my use case it doesn't"
I was wondering why that would be the case, as that appears contrary to what I have read - especiall since Postgres 9.2 has been released.
Have you tuned your PostgreSQL installations apropriately?
Have you tried PostgreSQL 9.2?
The most annoying, but accurate sttement from a highly paid consultant often is 'It depends!"
Seems difficult to get up to date meanigful performance comparisons, probably because Microsoft's licence forbids it unless they approve!
As to which is better... it depends!
I strongly suspect that given a fixed budget and starting from scratch buying new hardware: one wouild get more transactions per second using PostgreSQL & Linux over SQL Server & Microsoft O/S. Howver, I suspect that on the same hardware, PostgreSQL would be faster as then you can use Linux whereas SQL Server is limited to a Microsoft O/S.
Ten Reasons PostgreSQL is Better Than SQL Server:
http://facility9.com/2011/12/ten-reasons-postgresql-is-better-than-sql-server/
[...]
Jeremiah Peschka,
Wed Dec 14, 2011 at 7:19 am
Two other quick bits of info around PostgreSQL and scalability. You can see some of the current benchmarks here: Scalability, in Graphical Form, Analyzed. As far as other scalable companies using PostgreSQL – Instagram have recently published how they scale with PostgreSQL.
TL;DR version: Benchmarks show PostgreSQL 9.1 scaling up to around 45,000 transactions per second with 9.2s code base edging past the 200,000 TPS mark. ...
David,
Wed Apr 11, 2012 at 10:07 pm
completely changed my perspective on postgre, I always thought it was junk. Any leads on a VM to fool around with ?
[...]
http://rhaas.blogspot.co.nz/2010/12/postgresql-performance-vs-microsoft-sql.html
[...]
Grant JohnsonDecember 21, 2010 11:43 AM
Over many years of using both, here is what I have found:
For applications with plenty of hardware and few users, the two are very comparable for performance. As concurrency grows, PostgreSQL seems to handle it better, likely due to its MVCC model using disk in the existing data files. However, if the data file run out of room, it can be slower expanding used storage than SQL server. Keep your free space maps big enough, and your vacuums frequent enough to deal with it, and it is great.
The other time when it really seems to shine is when starved for hardware. PostgreSQL seems to deal much better with all of the CPU's being at 100% and swap going like mad trying to keep up. Remember also that I have always used PostgreSQL on Linux or BSD, so some of this may be how the operating systems handle different loads.
[...]
something I wrote about a month ago...
a Software Architect has The Grand Vision, constructs an Architecture, and hand waves about Implementation
a Software Engineer designs an Elegant Implementation, and curses the vagueness of the Software Architect
the Poor Bloody Programmer gets an implementation actually working, and curses the impracticality of the Software Engineer
I am all 3 on my current project, and this morning I had bitter experience of the last 2 lines above!
No!
There are 'existence' proofs in Mathematics, that show that something does exist, but not how to create one.
We were dealing with integers, or at least with non-fractional numbers - this was 40 years ago, so my recollection is a bit vague as to the other details!
We were never attempting to prove that 1 + 1 does not equal zero, just requiring that to be the case (in the sense that no claim of theorem validity was was made when 1 + 1 equaled zero ).
I am well aware that in the group (+, 0, 1), that 1 + 1 = 0. Similarly for the field (+, x, 0, 1). Sorry don't recall the formal mathematical notation used.
What does 'GF' stand for?