Re: Urgent help needed for press contact

On Wednesday 05 November 2003 16:12, Francois Suter wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was contacted a while ago by a French computer magazine who's going
> to run a special issue on open source databases. They are supposed to
> run case studies and I directed them to several volunteer French
> PostgreSQL users.
>
> Now they have just come back with a spreadsheet for comparing 4 OS DBs:
> MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird and MAXDB/SAPDB. The deadline for filling
> the table is tomorrow morning and there are some answers I don't (and
> some stupid questions I would rather not answer, but that's beside the
> point).
>
> So I would greatly appreciate any help to answer the following:
>
> -time to install (in hours) (talk about a stupid question!)

15 minutes from source compile on a good(read good CPU) Unix system.
2-3 minutes if you have source package..

Some handy URLs
http://techdocs.postgresql.org/guides/Windows
http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/PostgresQL101

> - hot backup: do we support that? (I'm not quite sure what is meant by
> that: replacing a database with its backup without losing a single
> transaction?)

Hot backup means backing up database without taking it down. We can do that.
(Provided the survey shares same opinion/definition of hot backup)

> - replication: I mentioned eRserver. Should I mention something else?

Yes. GBorg replication page. Net connectivity is dead here, unfortunately. You
have to hunt it yourself.

http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/pgreplication/projdisplay.php
http://gborg.postgresql.org/genpage?replication_research

> - the 3 strongest points

-Focus on
 * SQL compliane
 * Data integrity
- Flexibility
 * User defined rules
 * User defined languages
 * User defined data types
- simplicity
 * Minimum overhead install
 * Database engine does not include any bloated extras
 * Easy to start with and maintain

</Very subjective opinion>

> - the 3 weakest points

- Native windows port
- Built in async. replication and support for hot failover
-

Thats it. I can't fill up third one..:-)

> - minimal configuration in CPU, RAM and disks

Not explicitly tested for minimum configuration but following should work

100MHz CPU/ 8MB RAM/>100MB disk

> - max number of databases, records, record size, simultaneous
> connections

http://www.postgresql.org/users-lounge/limitations.html

Number of connections are limited by configuration and maximum available
shared memory.

> - memory footprint per connection

Not very sure but IIRC it is around 576KB per connection. But lot of this
could be shared as well. Just tested on my machine. +/- sharing tricks played
by linux. This is by using free and getting true memory usage.

> - max number of SQL queries per second (that sounds ridiculous, it
> really depends on what query)

Upto machine and network resources. Depends upon queries as well.

> - number of users in the world

Duh. We don't maintain registers for the users for sure. How the heck do we
answer this?

Probably this questions defines boundary of geekdom and PHBhood. If you can
answer this, you are/can be a PHB..:-)

HTH

 Shridhar