PostgreSQL

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PostgreSQL

Theologian

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Points: 81
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June 6, 2002 at 11:12 am

#79217

I would love to hear from anyone who has worked w/SQL Server and PostgreSQL. We are looking at moving some products to PostgreSQL for cost reasons. (Licensing costs way more than the hardware we will be using - doesn't seem right)
I'll be building a red hat box and getting things started today.
Any pitfalls to look out for? Major differences that I need to be aware of?
Any comments appreciated.
He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain that which he cannot lose.

He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep in order to gain that which he cannot lose.

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danw SSCommitted Points: 1842 More actions · Answer 1

I've worked with both...

PostgreSQL definately has some pitfalls that you should be aware of,

but I've been able to work around most of them.

First off and most annoying is the lack of a good joined update command.

The select statement in PGSQL does not allow for table aliases and does not conform to the same syntax as mssql.

Instead of:

select * from table1 a join table2 b on a.pkey=b.pkey

You have to use:

select * from table1 join table2 where table1.pkey=table2.pkey

Another particular area of annoyance is the lack of a stored procedure,

instead everything is done with functions and only on return variable is allowed. You can have more than one function of the same name as long as they accept different datatypes. This has some interesting uses but is mostly more difficult to manage. There is not really a native language for writing function either... it seems like plpgsql is the closest.

Let me know if you have any other questions,

Dan

deejay Say Hey Kid Points: 700 More actions · Answer 2

[font=Verdana]how about performance ??

triggers, mail, views, jobs, scheduled tasks, etcetera.

greetings, Deejay[/font=Verdana

danw SSCommitted Points: 1842 More actions · Answer 3

I didn't have to play around with triggers on PostgreSQL so I can't add much value there...

Views seem to be the same (other than the different select syntax)

Jobs and scheduled tasks have to be handled by the operating system (cron for unix, AT fot NT)

There is a simple and full recovery model, although I've never setup the full recovery model.

danw SSCommitted Points: 1842 More actions · Answer 4

Oh yeah you asked about performance too...

I can't really say for sure since my application isn't in production yet (www.roushi.net). I would assume it would be similar to MySQL (optimized for select statements on porn sites). It seems like they have done alot to improve the update engine, but I don't think that their internal flat file structure is setup to compete with SQL or Oracle performance.