[TriLUG] Dababases [Was:sendmail question -ONoRecipientAction=Add-To-Undisclosed]

[Chris Hedemark]

On Saturday, May 24, 2003, at 12:22 AM, Stephen P. Schaefer wrote:

> Ah, so you already knew more than I.

I think it may have been in one of yesterday's /. stories.  I don't 
want to mangle the story because it isn't in front of me, but my 
understanding was that there is quite a bit of custom development that 
has to happen before they switch to MySQL (but those changes will be 
released under the standard MySQL dual license).

>  I've had my eye on PostgrSQL for quite a while and know enough about 
> MySQL to expect PostgreSQL to be more featureful for now.  Could you 
> give me (us) a paragraph or two about  SAPDB?

Can't say much beyond the fact that our head architect played with 
SAPDB for awhile and wasn't impressed at all with its performance.

PostgreSQL is very feature rich, but hasn't been as fast as Oracle on 
identical hardware (I think part of the problem is that PostgreSQL was 
running on Linux when it is known to run faster on *BSD due to 
filesystem differences mainly, and the system was never really tuned 
for Postgres).  The other problem has been that PostgreSQL ODBC support 
has been less than stellar.

> The only striking thing I saw in its "features" is "unlimited size" - 
> which could mean almost anything.  I get nervous about PostgreSQL 
> tables being limited by the maximum file size of the underlying file 
> system, but maybe that's been addressed?  On Linux, that's 2^32 bytes 
> (approx 4Gig)*.

I'm fairly certain that the maximum table size is not 2^32 bytes under 
Linux.  In fact, I can authoritatively say that I work with files on a 
daily basis that exceed that size.  The limit used to be 2GB but now 
it's something like 4TB if memory serves (and while I have filesystems 
in that neighborhood, I don't have any individual files of that size).  
The 2.4 kernel blew away that 2GB file size limitation.

> Solaris can handle larger files, but does PostgreSQL compile cleanly 
> as a 64bit application?

Yes.  I'm not running PostgreSQL in production on sparc hardware 
though.  Just Oracle right now.  Oracle got in bed with Veritas who got 
in bed with Sun so in a nutshell, Oracle disk i/o screams on boxes 
running Solaris & Veritas.  No point in running PostgreSQL there.

--

Chris Hedemark
UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X / Windows consulting available.  No job 
too small!