Re: AW: Open Source Database Routs Competition in New Bench mark Tests

On Wed, 16 Aug 2000, Zeugswetter Andreas SB wrote:

> 
> > > Given all this performance discussion, has anyone seen any
> > > numbersregarding the speed of PostgreSQl vs Oracle?
> > 
> > Oracle and MS SQL Server must have been the two
> > "leading commercial RDBMSes" mentioned in the
> > article.
> 
> They mention Linux as one of the OS'es tested. Dont tell me they compared
> numbers under different OS's, like PostgreSQL on RedHat and M$Sql on NT.
> Thus my conclusion would be it can't be M$sql.

IMHO, and I think this is pretty common across must ppl in the computer
field, *any* benchmark generated by *anyone* has to be taken with a very
very large grain of salt.  I don't care if its Progress benchmarking
MySQL against the rest, or Great Bridge benchmarkng PostgreSQL against the
rest, or Oracle doing their own against the rest ... the results of any
benchmark is going to favor whom the benchmarker wants to favor,
period.  Not because of any malicious act on the benchmarker side, but
because the results that are presented generally don't show the whole
picture, or the benchmarker spent a bit more time tweaking the server that
they care about, or ... 101 other reasons ...

From what I've gathered in the threads, the tests that GB did were mainly
SELECT based ... fill a table, vacuum it and then run SELECTs against that
... but if GB were to release their exact tests, could the MySQL folks
re-run those same tests and have them come out in their favor?  My guess
is probably ... same with Oracle ... same with Informix ...

Now, a *good* benchmark would be for all the various vendors getting
together, agreeing on a set of benchmark tests as well as agreeing on the
environment (ie. everyone runs on a Dual-PIII 500 with 512Meg of RAM, and
these drives, this OS, etc) and they each run their own tests ... then
each vendor could sit down and optimize their software as only they really
know how and *then* see how each compares against the other ...

*that* is a test that I've love to see the results of ...

that's just my opinion ... its nice to finally see some tests out there
that does show us in front, and I thank GB for going through the trouble
of doing this, but I'm more a believer in what I can *see* in a real life
environment vs what a test environment shows, which is why I started in
with PostgreSQL in the first place, and why I've stuck with it all these
years *shrug*