I started working on my upcoming talk at PGCon 2008 and realized that I haven't put my talk from PostgreSQL Conference East 2008  - PostgreSQL and Benchmarks online yet.

 More on the upcoming presentation later.

In my previous post I briefly mentioned Database Appliance with Project Indiana. Now that Sun has acquired MySQL (or as some people say MySQL has acquired Sun) and with our existing work in progress with PostgreSQL, there are quite a bit of options available of using some combination  of Storage, System, Operating System, Database  along with some end user application and present it as either Database Appliance or use it as Embedded Database. 

I thought I will just discuss the audience, symptoms, merits, cons etc regarding the two approach and how they can be useful. 

 The first question is who likes database appliances and who wants embedded database? To answer that I would put the question back: What do you in hand? A hammer or a screw-driver? Because if you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail to you and …

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/ Do I really need to say more?

With the acquisition of MySQL I expect that many people might end up comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL using sysbench. It is like a micro-benchmark utility which includes an oltp mode which is used quite a bit to show MySQL performance. It can actually also be used with PostgreSQL. So this post is about how to configure sysbench to work with PostgreSQL. (Primarily a note for myself since I had to do hunt around to get it configured for PostgreSQL).

 
First download the latest version of sysbench. I had downloaded the version sysbench-0.4.8. After gunzip/untar I had to to figure out few steps to get the right configure script for it.

I am going to use the Sun Studio Compiler (since PostgreSQL in my case is also built with Sun Studio Compiler). So I will need the compiler cc in my …

There is a new wiki comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL. Because it's a wiki, hopefully it can be kept updated so that it's current AND accurate.

The wiki is MySQL vs PostgreSQL.

Personally, I'd like to see this grow into a universal comparison site that the community could keep updated.

LewisC

Solaris Express, Developer Edition 1/08 or SXDE 1/08 as its affectionately called within Sun is being released on monday. There are certain new features that I think needs to be highlighted specially for the PostgreSQL community.

Well for starters the versions of PostgreSQL included in SXDE are PostgreSQL 8.1.10 and PostgreSQL 8.2.5. (Unfortunately not all security fixes made it to the release though). However the big news is the PostgreSQL servers which are pretty hidden now has an administration GUI. Yes pgAdmin III is now included in SXDE.

Also there are lot of new features which now are quite well integrated with PostgreSQL.

For example take …

In a vortex. That's the only way to describe the past thirty days, during which we closed out our second quarter, and put together the transaction to acquire MySQL. How'd it all start?

"That'll never happen, I've been trying for years." That's what I told Rich Green (EVP, Software at Sun) about six months ago in response to his assertion, "if there were one company I'd love to acquire, it'd be MySQL. They're an amazing company." Why'd I say it was impossible?

For nearly five years, I've been getting together for dinner with Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO, catching up on the industry, chatting about trends and business models, and just as the dessert was about to be served... I'd say, "geez, we have so much in common, Marten, we …

As days goes by, more and more multi-core systems are popping up everywhere. Infact, with the advent of the new 4-socket quad-core Sun Fire X4450 , 16-core systems are soon becoming common out there.

However,personally, I think these systems are still underutilized from their true potentials.  Of course virtualization is a way of increasing the utilization but  that is like working around the symptoms and not fixing the real problems. Software Applications fundamentally has lagged behind the microprocessor innovations. Operating Systems too have lagged behind too. Solaris, however advanced opertating system has still lot to achieve in this area. For example, yes the kernel is multi-threaded, yes it can scale well easily to 100s of cores but that scaling is generally achieved by creating copies of the process (or multiple connections or multiple threads however you look at it) at the APPLICATION level.  One area however …

The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.

If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

That error is not enough to say for sure that the problem is PostgreSQL avoiding wraparound failure by not accepting connections. A quick look at the hqdb.log can confirm. The telltale log entries look like this:

FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database "postgres"
HINT: Stop the postmaster and …

In Part II in this series, I talk about how these three databases compare in some particularly crucial areas.

For instance how do the optimizers of these different database engines behave, and why does that matter?  What type of indexes are available, particularly with respect to typical applications.  I then move on to datatypes available and which are missing.  You’ll find some surprises here.

Lastly the holy grail of any modern relational database, I discuss transactional support. Relevant concepts include ACID compliance, read-only versus insert and update activity, and so on.