Good post (was Re: [TriLUG] Recommend some 'big iron'?)

[M. Mueller (bhu5nji)]

Well said.  

Mike M.

On Monday 04 February 2002 12:20 pm, you wrote:
> [Andrew Perrin]
>
> > > If performance is of the utmost importance, are you sure you want
> > > PostgreSQL?
> >
> > What would you recommend? I do want the transactions, conssitency, etc.,
> > that pg provides, so I'm not likely to use mySQL. And I would very much
> > like the system to be all-free (as in speech), so I'd like to avoid
> > oracle, etc.  Any other ideas?
>
> Keep in mind that much like java itself, performance problems in the
> past tend to hang around as false impressions in the present/future.
> There have been multiple benchmarks showing postgres faster for many
> workloads, sometimes by huge margins.
>
> http://apachetoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2000-08-14-008-01-PR-MR-SW
>
> If you can get an quick idea if the kinds of data and queries you'll be
> dealing with, don't listen to anyone else - benchmark it yourself!
>
> Every DBMS will have cases where it beats up everyone else.  What's
> important is what's fast and works well for your load.
>
> If you expect large transactions and complex joins, toss those in to
> your testing.  If lots of updates, do that, etc.
>
> A close second is to get a "feel" for what (oltp, dss, etc. kinds of
> tags would be a little too coarse on the granularity, but it depends
> on how much time/effort you can dedicate to this call) kind of load
> you'll be dealing with, find a close-ish benchmark (tpcc for oltp,
> tpc-r/-h/whatever for dss, etc) and see how things work there.  Finding
> benchmarks of TPC benchmarks for the free dbms's could be tougher, so
> you may have to make do with what's out there, although I'd still
> recommend doing your own benchmark if at all possible :)
>
> It's kind of funny, because a guy was trying to convince me last night
> of how compiled C code could do this set of operations so much faster
> than Java, and when I had him actually benchmark, the ibm jre won by 30%
>
> Never trust the opinions/benchmarks/etc of other people when it comes
> to your own performance issues.  Benchmark yourself.  No else's load
> will match yours.  There is no spoon.
>
> If you actually read this entire post, you deserve more than just a
> cookie - you deserve my sincere sympathy.
>
> James