Re: Oracle and Postgresql Play Nice Together on Same

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 23:03, Troyston Campano wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am an Oracle DBA and I want do a Postgresql ‘proof of concept’ at
> the large corporation where I work to test the benefits of using
> Postgresql in our environment. I want to install Postgresql onto a
> “production” server that currently runs Oracle. Are there any problems
> with running Postgresql and Oracle on the same machine? I mean, I’ve
> heard that the way Sybase and DB2 UDB are architected to handle memory
> hurts Sybase when DB2 UDB is installed on the same machine as the
> Sybase Server (something about UDB eating up all the memory and not
> giving it back to Sybase).
>
>
>
> Are there any issues running Postgresql and Oracle on the same
> machine…anything special to know about memory, disk layout, and things
> like that? I just want to make sure the two engines play together on
> this same server. I had a hard time finding information about this via
> google.


The only issue you're likely to face is the one you've already
mentioned, that Oracle may be configured to use most of the memory on
the machine, and PostgreSQL, in general, relies on the OS to do the
caching for it. Since there might not be much free / cache memory on the
machine, PostgreSQL may run a bit slower than it would were it the only
thing on the machine.

However, you can always do a benchmark with Oracle running, then shut
down oracle for a few minutes and see if PostgreSQL runs any faster with
the extra memory being used by the OS to cache the dataset.