Re: [GENERAL] Postgres vs commercial products

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Herouth Maoz wrote:

> He didn't ask me what the features were. I'm quite willing to specify them.
> Yes, I'm quite aware that many of them are in the pipeline... But hey, if I
> install Oracle/Informix, I'd have them all *now*, tested and debugged by
> many users before me.
>
> - Convenient tools for backing up, including scheduling of
>   backups. Same for vacuum and any other periodical maintenance.

    What to give me pointers to these?  We use Oracle here, and the
SOP from before I got here was to shutdown Oracle, backup the system and
then restart Oracle up again.  We're moving our backups to a centralized
system, and using Oracle modules for doing this, but from our DBA's
perusal of the Oracle documentation, there is nothing "convienent" about
setting it up...

> - Support for raw devices (my sysadmin prefers it).

    This one I just checked about, and Oracle still appears to
recommend using raw devices, as they claim it can be up to 50%
faster...but, how would one implement this in PostgreSQL?  So far, I
believe you are the only one that is asking for it, so don't hold your
breath on it ever getting done, but I'm curious, unless you wanted to
implement it yourself...

    Under Oracle, its easy, since you 'pre-size' your tables when you
create your databases, and the tables will not grow beyond that size.
With PostgreSQL, there is no bounds, except hard disk, to how large your
tables will grow.

    I don't know how Oracle implements this, as we don't use it
here...

    The other problem with trying to implement RAW devices, and,
granted, I could be over cmplicating it, but how do you implement it
across X operating systems running Y platforms?  Doesn't each of them
access drives differently?  And, in some cases, multiply that by two for
IDE vs SCSI...or...vs...?