Re: Ingres versus PostgreSQL

John Wells <jbwellsiv@gmail.com> writes:

> Now that Ingres has been open-sourced, I'm curious about where it
> stands with regards to PostgreSQL.  Is it a worthy competitor?
> PostgreSQL has been my database of choice for many years, and I'm very
> interested in how Ingres and PostgreSQL stack up in terms of features
> and performance.

I was curious about this too. I've been perusing the documentation for a bit
now.

It seems like ingres has done some interesting things that postgres hasn't.
But it hasn't done a lot of the cool things that postgres has either. So it's
really a case of each having complementary strengths.

My first impression is that while postgres has gone after building the most
flexible programmer-friendly system that lets programmers go wild with
customization and complex data structures; Ingres has gone after the features
administrators like for managing large databases.

So while I can find no mention of user-defined types, aggregate functions,
operators, etc. And as far as I can find, no way to add new server-side
languages. And so on. In fact their standard data types are pretty basic.
Nothing like cidr, no spatial data types (Actually I think these exist but
were excluded from the open source distribution). You're pretty much stuck
with the standard SQL data types.

On the other hand it has features Postgres doesn't have that are important.
You can configure multiple buffer caches for pages of different sizes and then
decide on a per-table basis which of those page sizes to use. It does have
partitioned tables support, something that's pretty high on my wishlist for
Postgres. I also noticed it has nested transactions. And it has
two-phase-commit support. And I certainly haven't read everything yet.

Basically it seems they've gone after the checklist items companies have on
their "enterprise-class features" lists. While postgres has gone after the
"wouldn't it be cool if I could do this" list. Which is a fairly typical
contrast between proprietary and open-source development.

Personally, as a developer, I like the types of software open source projects
develop. They're just more flexible, more comfortable to work with, and, well,
more fun. And postgres is impressive because it manages to get a lot of those
big enterprise features done too. 7.3, 7.4 and 8.0 all added major
"enterprise-class" features at an incredible pace.

--
greg