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Re^2: What is your favourite Linux or cross-platform database?

by afoken (Chancellor)
on Mar 30, 2010 at 07:57 UTC ( [id://831776]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: What is your favourite Linux or cross-platform database?
in thread What is your favourite Linux or cross-platform database?

It's interesting that nobody mentioned MySQL.

Hmmm, sounds like good news. *SCNR*

No, really. MySQL has some strengths, especially its raw read performance is mentioned repeatedly. But it has a lot of gotchas due to over-optimizing for some rare use cases.

Oracle also wasn't mentioned here. There are some free versions of Oracle, I don't know how they are called today, I think something like "Personal Edition" or "XE". I've worked with Oracle in at least three different projects, and I like it, except for some minor annoyances. Empty strings sometimes mutate into NULL, you can't (always) use column aliases in WHERE or HAVING conditions, and so on. And Oracle is *FAT*. Why does a relational database have to install its own versions of Apache, Perl, Java, and tons of other software?

I really like PostgreSQL. Nice, clean, fast and lean. Free as in beer and free as in speech. The pgAdminIII GUI often comes bundled, or you can download it as source. Compiling PostgreSQL is just fun, pgAdminIII has some dependencies that have to be resolved. And newer versions of PostgreSQL have the Auto-Vaccum feature, so you don't have to run VACUUM manually any more. Alas, there are some minor gotchas, too.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: What is your favourite Linux or cross-platform database?
by erix (Prior) on Mar 30, 2010 at 16:02 UTC

    IMHO, that (2007) postgresql-'gotchas' webpage is not very useful anymore: almost all of these so-called 'gotchas' were relevant only to pretty old versions of Pg.

    Here is a list of release dates:

    pg version 7.4:  2003
    pg version 8.0:  2005
    pg version 8.1:  2005
    pg version 8.2:  2006
    pg version 8.3:  2008
    pg version 8.4:  2009
    

    Running a version older than 8.3 is rarely necessary.

    Re: comparison PostgreSQL - Oracle: important things that are missing or not good enough in current (=8.4) postgresql:

    • Replication: there are (good) replication solutions, but all are outside projects. Version 9.0, scheduled for later this year, will contain native replication.
    • In-place upgrades: Upgrades need a dump and restore - and not all databases can afford that downtime. (Version 9.0 will probably have an in-place upgrade facility.)
    • Partitioning: possible, but limited to a few hundred partitions.

    Then again, compared to Oracle, PostgreSQL is much more immune to over-deployment ;-)

    Update (2012.10.27):

    PostgreSQL now has native replication (both asynchronous and synchronous (it cannot do synchronous multimaster).

    In-place upgrade is also now provided.

    Partitioning remains a somewhat weak point. (although it works well enough for many common scenarios)

    Update (2018.10.27):

    PostgreSQL 10 has logical replication (i.e., you can limit replication to only the necessary tables)

    PostgreSQL 10 has much improved partitioning.

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