Re: Anyone working on better transaction locking?

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 05:41:06AM +0000, Ron Peacetree wrote:

> Actually, you've just used reductio absurdium, not I.  My question

Nonsense.  You explicitly made the MVCC comparison with Oracle, and
are asking for a "better" locking mechanism without providing any
evidence that PostgreSQL's is bad.  

> compares PostgreSQL to the performance leaders within this domain
> since I'll have to justify my decisions to my bosses based on such
> comparisons.  If you think that is unrealistic, then I wish I worked

Where I work, we test our systems to performance targets having to do
with what we use the database for.  Generic database benchmarks are
not something I have a great deal of faith in.  I repeat my assertion
that, if you have specific areas of concern and the like, and they're
not on the TODO (or in the FAQ), then people would be likely to be
interested; although they'll likely be more interested if the
specifics are not a lot of hand-wavy talk about PostgreSQL not doing
something the right way.

> treating PostgreSQL as a religion and not a SW product that must
> compete against every other DB solution in the real world in order to
> be relevant or even survive.

Actually, given that we are dependent on PostgreSQL's performance and
stability for the whole of the company's revenue, I am pretty certain
that I have as much "real world" experience of PostgreSQL use as
anyone else.  

> Please see my posts with regards to sorting and searching, two phase
> execution, and two phase commit.  

I think your other posts were similar to the one which started this
thread: full of mighty big pronouncements which turned out to depend
on a bunch of not-so-tenable assumptions.  

I'm sorry to be so cranky about this, but I get tired of having to
defend one of my employer's core technologies from accusations based
on half-truths and "everybody knows" assumptions.  For instance,

> I'll mention thread support in passing,

there's actually a FAQ item about thread support, because in the
opinion of those who have looked at it, the cost is just not worth
the benefit.  If you have evidence to the contrary (specific evidence,
please, for this application), and have already read all the previous
discussion of the topic, perhaps people would be interested in
opening that debate again (though I have my doubts).

A

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Andrew Sullivan                         204-4141 Yonge Street
Liberty RMS                           Toronto, Ontario Canada
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