On Dec 20, 2006, at 22:40, Lester Caine wrote:

>> - Postgres is faster, and is not nearly as sensitive to indexing
> I'd dispute that - depends on the job.
> On bitweaver I'm finding that Firebird gives faster results then
> Postgres most of the time but I don't have documented info yet :(
> I'm working on that but it's not a priority.

I have a set of nightly benchmarks that run the same set of tests
against both Firebird 2.0 and Postgres 8.1.5 on the same machine.
Here is a plot showing the average query times for the past three weeks.


----------


As you can see, Firebird is consistently slower, yet the Postgres
database has NO indexing. Now, this is not the most scientific
benchmark around, but it is at least fairly consistent and includes
the same sets of tests over a significant period of time.

(I included the other SQL engines just for grins, but they run on
different machines - sometimes on TWO different machines when we test
multiple versions e.g. MySQL 4 and 5. Also, I suspect our Oracle
tables need some serious TLC in the indexing department... And we
had a big wind storm in Settle over the weekend of 12/16 which may
have resulted in some server being rebooted, messing up the steady
state.)

>> - Postgres has a much richer built in function set.
> Partly true, but you can't add functions to Posgres like you can
> Firebird, so some of my local Firebird stuff can't be ported to it.

Yes, but while there are some great UDF packages out there (we use
FreeAdHocUDF) it is not so nice if you just want some common
functionality (e.g. exponents, stddev, variance). At the very least,
you have to load the darn things into EVERY database you might want
to use them with. So while it is great to be extensible, it would
also be nice to have more stuff built in.
________________________________________________________
Richard Wesley Senior Software Developer Tableau
Software
Visit: http://www.trytableau.com/now.html





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