Postgres vs. MSSQL

[Jonathan Ellis]

On Wed, 08 Nov 2006 10:49:28 -0700, "Michael L Torrie"
<torriem at chem.byu.edu> said:
> But if you want to base it soley on technical grounds, there is no
> contest, according to what I've been told.  Postgres is better hands
> down.  I have a friend (famous last words I know) who does large-scale
> database programming for a living and tells me MS SQL is based on the
> old Sybase engine, which has serious locking issues.  He claims to have
> code that can, with just a few concurrent queries, bring MS SQL, Sybase,
> and even DB2 to their knees.  (MySQL too, obviously.).  The only
> databases that can handle some of their stuff are Oracle and PostgreSQL.
> Bear in mind I'm not talking about the the granularity of the lock
> (MySQL's locking is much finer now than it used to be) but rather the
> techniques used to enforce data integrity.

Well, isolation implementation isn't really related to data integrity.

And the downside to MVCC in postgresql is that vacuuming can be a pain. 
(I'm not sure how Oracle works internally; it doesn't need vacuum.  But
then the core oracle engine is around 2-3x slower than postgresql, so
maybe that has something to do with it.)

-Jonathan
-- 
C++ is history repeated as tragedy. Java is history repeated as farce.  --Scott McKay