On Apr 17, 2008, at 6:07 AM, Mark Waser wrote:
I have to laugh at your total avoidance of Microsoft SQL Server which is arguably faster and better scaling for truly mixed use than everything except possibly Oracle on ordinary hardware; which is much easier to use than Oracle; and which is the easiest to actually put *GOOD* code in the database engine itself (particularly when compared to Oracle's *REALLY* poor java imitation).
Discussing SQL Server does not generalize well in that they reimplement the core engine design with almost every release once they realize they hosed the design with the last release. For example, up until SQL Server 2005 the transaction engine was weak such that PostgreSQL could spank it in transaction throughput -- in 2005 they switched to a transaction model more like PostgreSQL and Oracle and gained some parity. SQL Server still does not really distribute all that easily, unlike Oracle or PostgreSQL.
SQL Server versions before the current two year old one were pretty much dogs in a lot of ways. The most recent version is as you state a pretty solid database engine. Oracle is a major pain in the ass to use but does scale well, though for many OLTP loads it is barely faster than PostgreSQL these days.
If putting your code in the engine is the goal, PostgreSQL wins by a country mile. The entire engine from front to back is deeply hackable with very clean APIs and you can even safely bind binary code into the engine at runtime. That the transaction engine scales quite well is just a bonus. People have already written hooks for a dozen languages into it. I've written performance-sensitive customizations of PostgreSQL in the past, and for purposes like that it can often be much faster than the commercial alternatives, as the alternatives tend to be relatively feature poor and shallow when it comes to engine customization. Making deep and very flexible customization a safe core feature was a design decision tradeoff in PostgreSQL that is somewhat unique to it. You can do a lot of really cool software implementation tricks with it that Oracle and SQL Server do not do.
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