PostgreSQL benchmarks
Posted by mop Wed, 30 Jun 2004 01:59:00 GMT
PostgreSQL has been the highest profile open source transactional RDBMS for a while, deserved or no. It gets the most eyeballs and one hopes that this translates to reliability and performance. My experience with a certain proprietary RDBMS and PostgreSQL suggests that open source translates to reliability. But performance? Don’t know.
Benchmarks have always been tightly controlled by the big vendors like Oracle and Microsoft. Can’t blame them for discouraging the publication of ad-hoc test results -- it’s a non-linear system and results are highly dependent on conditions beyond the control of the vendor. The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) is a non-profit that publishes benchmark results from standardized tests. You’ll find some impressive numbers for Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Oracle, mostly running on expensive hardware. So where are the open source benchmarks? I’m guessing that nobody has yet ponied up the cash required to put PostgreSQL through the TPC tests.
Cheers to the Open Source Development Labs for taking on the task of creating a test suite and providing an alternative to the TPC. Their test suite currently runs with PostgreSQL and SAP DB (now MaxDB). Some of the results are un-impressive, 20 TPS on 4xPIII 700MHz, when compared with commercial RDBMS. More interesting are the evaluations of the Linux kernels and file systems.
