
PostgreSQL versus Oracle - craigkerstiens
http://diznix.com/2010/07/27/postgresql-versus-oracle/
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vegas
Here's the article in Bing's cache:
[http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fdiznix.com%2f2...](http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=http%3a%2f%2fdiznix.com%2f2010%2f07%2f27%2fpostgresql-
versus-oracle%2f&d=5010835797704716&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-
US&w=4f5aaf93,222626b0)

Microsoft: Champion of the persistent web!?

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gbaygon
> Microsoft: Champion of the persistent web!?

what?

Here is the google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ge0OdZ2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ge0OdZ2RVe4J:diznix.com/2010/07/27/postgresql-
versus-oracle/+&cd=1&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=ar)

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sciurus
"the PostgreSQL version in use was 8.4.4."

Does anyone know if text search performance is significantly different in the
(as of 2012-04-23) latest version, 9.1.3?

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lobster_johnson
Presumably deleted because Oracle's terms of use prohibit the publishing of
benchmarks.

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tbrownaw
Any idea if that's everywhere, or only here in the US with our record of being
completely useless about prosecuting anti-competitiveness?

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dripton
EULAs are only valid in some jurisdictions.

Of course, even if one lives in a jurisdiction where they're not, it would
take some guts to stand up to Oracle's lawyers. And to convince your ISP, your
government, etc. to stand up to Oracle's lawyers.

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EzGraphs
An Oracle DBA pointed out to me years ago that MySQL performed better under
certain circumstances. It seems like PostGres does a pretty good job keeping
up with Oracle features and is much more open and customizable. I am sure
PostGres excels in many areas and is a suitable substitute for Oracle for many
projects.

Does it have equivalent functionality to some of the more recent Oracle
features like flashback queries and analytic functions (with windowing etc)?
Are there any areas where Oracle clearly excels?

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lobster_johnson
Postgres has window functions, and I believe it supports the full ANSI
windowing function feature set.

Nothing like Oracle's flashback queries. It used to have a feature called time
travel which allowed you to look at historical versions of data, something
they could do thanks to MVCC. It was removed, presumably because it caused
performance issues or was too complex to maintain.

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hiroprot
Mmm...so this was a test that compared a production server that is presumedly
under load against a test server that is seeing no load other than the
testing?

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EzGraphs
Or here: <http://diznix.com/2010/07/27/>

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avar
Interesting that they're testing full-text search on the two, it would be very
interesting to benchmark it against something like ElasticSearch or another
scalable full-text search engine to see how fast that would be by comparison.

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lobster_johnson
Yep. ElasticSearch is actually quite slow, as text engines go. It seems
designed to scale, rather than provide single-machine performance.

Even so we are seeing very slow queries on our 8-node cluster, even for
relatively simple queries and small datasets. It seems very sensitive to the
result set size (ie., the maximum item number set in the query). A limit of 50
might take 500ms (which is slow but acceptable in our case) whereas 1000
results might take 3-4 _seconds_. The indexes are all in OS cache so disk
performance is not the bottleneck.

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avar
I'd be interested to know what your index looks like / how the mapping is set
up / what the datasize is / what sort of queries you're making, because that's
definitely not my experience with it. It's lighting fast on my workloads.

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IsTom
I'm not sure about the current version of Oracle, but the one I used did not
support nested WITH clauses. Pain in the lower part of the back if you want to
compose and optimize queries. PostgreSQL has no such silly trouble.

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evandena
Am I missing the joke?

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obtu
WordPress is MySQL-only.

