the database question

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Hello.

My organization is looking into changing its database over.

I would like to know people's opinions on the DB's out there.

We have about 500 tables with a total of about 20million records. Our DB is about 23.2 GB. We are interested in replication from a web cluster to our in house db machine.

We currently use informix, and are considering mysql or postgresql.

The question is, can Postgresql or mysql handle something like this? Let's assume we have a 2.4 ghz cpu and 2 gigs of ram... would this be adequate.

Is moving to an open source db to do this realistic?

Thanks!

G
_________________
To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

markkuk · Guru Joined: 29 Nov 2002 Posts: 446

PostgreSQL FAQ claims that 32TB pgsql databases exist. Another possibility is MaxDB (formerly known as SAP DB).

shiftless · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 08 Oct 2003 Posts: 128

Well i would imagine eithor of them would be able to handle it... Currently where i work i have a project that has about 150million records over about 100 tables, which is around 35GB in size. We are expecting it to be triple that size once it stabalizes with a years worth of data. We are currently using MySQL (3.23) not sure on the speed of the machine but it only has 1G of ram and runs on a 160GB ide drive. It does fine for the most part, ram wise its fine, the real problem with that machine is ofcourse disk io.

The only things i dont like about MySQL is its lack of features (newer versions than we are using are better though) and that its not very compliant to the sql standard in some places. Having to put in MySQL specific sql in places makes portablility harder if we want to change at some point in the future.

ultraslacker · Posted: Thu Dec 18, 2003 11:27 pm Post subject:

Between the two I would pick postgresql, but they are very different animals - postgresql is an advanced, acid compliant oordbms, mysql is a simple fast dbms.

grooveman · Veteran Joined: 24 Feb 2003 Posts: 1217

Thanks guys,

The concern with postgresql is that it does not seem to have a replication feature. From what I hear, mysql does. Is this correct?

The other concern our DB admins have is that their diskmanagement is not as flexible as is informix. (Informix allows you to use raw space, dictate and span chunks etc. etc.). How important is this kind of thing really? Are mysql and prostgresql just so efficient that it isn't deemed necessary, or is this sort of functionality just not developed yet for opensource dbs?

Thanks again for the advice -- keep it coming!

G
_________________
To look without without looking within is like looking without without looking at all.

ultraslacker · Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2003 3:12 pm Post subject:

Replication is available for the 7.3.4 and 7.4 versions of postgresql. Raw devices are not supported. Informix uses raw devices for performance and integrity. The performance benefit of raw devices is not that big an issue, imo, and postgresql uses other methods for integrity.

dabooty · Guru Joined: 15 May 2003 Posts: 482 Location: Belgium