Re: [PLUG] Can Open Source Replace Oracle?

[Chris Hedemark <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 10:01 PM, Barry Roomberg wrote:

> Required 3rd party software said: PUKE - HURL - DIE.

3rd Party Software Vendor said (to concerned sysadmin who likes to take 
care of his developers) "We have not heard of problems with PostgreSQL 
but if you will give us access to a PostgreSQL box, we will work with 
you to make sure it works 100%.  We claim 100% ODBC support and stand 
by that."

> So my boss, who LOVES M$ desktop tools and HATES M$
> backend stuff wants to try MySQL again. He's been told
> by the Open Source gnomes [snip]

Wasn't *this* gnome.  Besides, I use KDE. ;-)

> I shmooze a bit and commandeer a dual 2.4 GHz Xeon box. It has about 2 
> weeks
> before it is expected to be rolled out as an Oracle compute server. It 
> has
> 5 fast SCSI disks and a high end RAID controller. I spent extra $$$ on
> the RAID controller. It does NOT get any faster than this for a single
> tasking test. I am the only user on this box.

SAN storage would have been nicer than local disk but I'm not going to 
cry over it now.  Kernel tuning figures were, as best as I can tell, 
pulled verbatim from examples given in an Oracle whitepaper and not 
tuned to the server in question.

> Add up the time saved in productions, the happier interactive 
> customer, and
> the dark side has just won this one.
>
> Unless someone can point out any tuning problem I might have?

Yes, but not on SAP-DB.  Rewind to PostgreSQL.

One of the production PostgreSQL servers was configured by someone to 
have more shared memory available than actual physical memory.  Hmmm.  
PostgreSQL gurus pitch numbers of no more than 50%-75% of physical 
memory should go to shared memory.  This is just the first thing I 
found.  I pretty much stopped looking there at that point, consulted 
with the DBA to see if any tuning was done, confirmed that there wasn't 
and asked $BOSS to let me spend some time on this to at least improve 
production systems that currently run against PostgreSQL.  If 
PostgreSQL is going to eat with the dogs for its poor performance, at 
least it should be because of true product suckage and not poor 
configuration.

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