At 07:27 PM 8/14/00 -0500, you wrote:

>I get awful tired of seeing these benchmark tests that do nothing but
>compare transaction speed. Im not saying that they'r useless, but close.

On a day to day basis I would say that stability is the single most
important factor for a database. Unfortunately no benchmark measures that.
Transactions are very important of course but I would love to see a test of
the optimizers. In a web app where you have a lot of selects the optimizer
plays a huge role.

>I once built a drag car. It would do 0-60mph in about 3.5 seconds. A "stock"
>corvette would do 0-60 inabout 6.5 seconds. So I guess my car was about 80%
>faster than a corvette. Which would you drive to work?
>
> From what I have heard, Postgres lacks some of the higher end features of
>Interbase and the other high end systems. Once they add these features, Im
>sure its performance will drop off also. But in the meantime, maybe
>we(Inprise, Newco, IBDI and whoever) needs to put together our own
>"unbiased" benchmark test against the competition. Show them what a SP can
>do for performance, etc...

Postgres is kind of weird when it comes to features. It has some very
stunning but rarely used features like RULES, regular expressions, operator
overloading etc. On the other hand it's missing some common ones like outer
joins (doh!). I mean what is more important loadable stored procedure
languages (three at last count) or outer joins. Seems wacky.

>Lets try a benchmark with Interbase coupled with IBO, and watch it blow the
>doors off of Postgres. I don't care if its not an "apples to apples"
>comparison or not. Its how the DB is being used in the real world.

Unfortunately in the real world ODBC/ADO is king. Crystal reports, ASP,
cold fusion, ms-access, excell etc all play a major role in how the
database is being used. In the embedded apps it's not so important but
trust me you'll want to say you can connect your data to ms-office.


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Tim Uckun
Mobile Intelligence Unit.
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"There are some who call me TIM?"
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