Open source is hot these days, and Oracle knows it. The company is facing challenges from open source competitors by embracing open source technology in its own right – acquiring and developing key companies and products in this area – as well as fighting to show its merits over other open source choices. How does Oracle stack up against PostgreSQL? How do Oracle and Linux work together? What’s next for Oracle on the open source front?
I’d say PostGreSQL and MySQL are evolving nicely, couple them with PERL and JBOSS and you have a decent platform to deploy your ERP solution!
I’d say PostgreSQL and MySQL barely belong in the same sentence together. MySQL has never been a realistic competitor to Oracle, except in the limited case of simple, read-mainly databases.
It’s not just about performance, and it never has been. It is about serious manageability of your data. It is about knowing for sure that the database does what you say–and that what you say is what you mean–with your data. MySQL has a terrible track record in that area (they are addressing it somewhat in versions 5+ with ANSI-standard switches, so we’ll see where things go)
On the other hand, when it comes to logical data manageability, PostgreSQL correlates quite nicely to Oracle. The only areas where PostgreSQL might really be considered behind Oracle are in the “extended” implementation areas, such as stored procedures, clustering and sophistication of server management (on-disk layout, table partitioning, tablespaces, etc…). And really, PostgreSQL is making strides in each of these areas.
Hmm…might be off topic but I have never really worked a lot with PostgreSQL but mainly because for quick stuff MySQL is just unbeatable with its graphical tools and so on for quick creation of tables and so on. I wonder if PostgreSQL has that. Also does anyone know of any tools that will migrate my sample tables over to PostgreSQL with minimal hassle?
I wonder if PostgreSQL has that. Also does anyone know of any tools that will migrate my sample tables over to PostgreSQL with minimal hassle?
There are free GUI admin/development tools for postgresql e.g. pgAdminIII, there are also many commersial closed source tools for postgresql development. Personally I like the web based phpPgAdmin tool best. It is far more advanced than the similarly named phpMyAdmin tool for MySQL.
For porting MySQL stuff to postgres there is compatibility library available that could be helpful when porting MySQL applications to Postgresql you find it at: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/mysqlcompat/
There are also plenty commersial tools that might help you migrate MySQL to Postgresql. Even though you should be able to migrate quite easily with the compatibility lib mentioned above as both MySQL and Postgresql can dump their contents into sql form.
Unfortunately MySQL dumps in a nonstandard insert statement format with multiple value fields for each insert line, but with a little tweaking with standard unix text editing tools that is quite easily fixed.
From my point of view, a flow-on (and very real) benefit of PostgreSQL and MySQL is that they’re not being pushed by a company which wants to take over your complete computer (10g RAC) and storage (10g ASM).
On the other hand, if I was running a large corp (> 10000 employees) I’d want something that can scale and be highly available, possibly even parallel. For my money, that’s where Oracle sits. Any requirement less than that and I’m gonna stick with PostgreSQL.
You’re right about high-end enterprise wanting high-availability and concurrent access. However, this is less a feature of the database and more a feature of the operating system stack and application design. As far as I know, all high-availabitity clustering solutions are capable of running a wide variety of service payloads, including various database implementations. Concurrent access is more a function of how the application is programmed than which database is running.
In short, a highly-available clustering platform running Oracle is would be no more available than the same platform running a less expensive database. I guess the Oracle system might failover to peer nodes less frequently, at best.
a matter of scale. Any dbms seems pretty ok until you start really shoveling the coal to it.
i just recently ported a php webapp from mysql to postgresql, it was no problem at all, mostly renaming mysql_* commands to pg_* barely any syntax changes.
on the schema side it was changing auto_increments to serials.
in the sql it was mainly changing nulls to defaults.
i used some regex replaces in kate to convert a mysqldump to a set of standard insert statements for sourcing into psql (just the data, i recreated the tables using pgadmin3).
python support is good too – there’s at least 4 postgresql modules, three of which are dbi2-compliant.
with databases there always seems to be specific sectors that use them:
big companies use oracle/db2;
mcse/phb -types use sql server;
banks use sybase;
foss projects/hacky webdevs use mysql.
postgresql never seems to be on the map, bit like firebird i guess.
As far as Postgresql admin clients go, you get what you pay for. The best I have used is PG Lightning Admin at http://www.amsoftwaredesign.com