Re: [GENERAL] Re: Is PostgreSQL ready for mission critical applications?

On Sun, 21 Nov 1999, Jochen Topf wrote:

> > Stephen Birch <sbirch@ironmountainsystems.com> writes:
> > Question: Is PostgreSQL ready for mission critical applications?
> > [...]
>
> I was very pleased with PostgreSQL in the beginning, but that changed after
> a while. PostgreSQL is not really stable, in fact it is very easy to crash
> the backend process that is handling the connection to your client and quite
> often the other backends shut down, too. I have seen many random errors, for
> instance sometimes loading a new stored procedure will crash the database,
> while it works the next time. Sometimes databases grow over every bound
> making the system slower and slower, the vaccum process needs hours to do
> its work and nothing except a dump and rebuild of the database helps.

Odd...I have a large group of users who *hammer* on my postgres database
daily.  I have twelve years worth of records in one local database...
despite all sorts of errors made by users (and electricians) we have
been fortunate, corruption wise.

We switched over from FoxPro about a year ago.   Dropped PROGRESS soon
after.  All of our character mode and web interface apps were ported
over and the performance is better than what we had previously.  I also
tested Oracle, Sybase and Informix and opted for Postgres.

I haven't had cause to regret it.  Occasionally (when I hastily write
sloppy queries that contain ORDER BY clauses) I have to clean up some
stale pg_sort files but aside from this (my error) postgres runs well.
I not only can recommend it for mission critical apps, I generally do
even if the affirmation is unsolicited.  ;-)

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