postgreSQL successes (Interbase?)

[Norman Shelley]

Have you looked at Interbase (newly made OpenSource)?  We used it years ago and
it was a very nice and easy to use DB. And because it was commercial I've got to
believe they worked very hard on speed as well as consistencty/safety.


Eric Lee Green wrote:

> robin.escalation at ACM.org wrote:
> > Does anyone have any success stories (or gotchas) related to
> > implementing a PostgreSQL database with Python that they'd like to
> > share? I am hoping to use it as a back-end to a b2b web site.
>
> Yes. Can't tell you exactly at the moment though (NDA).
>
> Basic plusses of PostGreSQL: transactions, cursors, stored procedures, joins
> with subselects, all mostly work as you'd expect of any SQL database. The same
> cannot be said to be true of most other embedded databases out there (e.g.
> RAIMA, C-Tree, MySQL, ...). Read performance is good, and the DBMS engine
> supports all the usual kinds of locking that you'd expect from an RDBMS.
>
> Minuses: The page length restriction on size of a record can be the pits, if
> you're not careful about your design. If you need BLOBs, you're out of luck
> (the Python module supposedly supports the PostGreSQL BLOB type, but it's not
> reliable). Insert speed is horrible -- inserting data takes forever and a
> half, though PostGreSQL 7.0 now has a bulk import facility that may make it
> faster (I haven't had a chance to benchmark it yet). And, finally, the
> documentation is cryptic, incomplete, and scattered all over the place... I
> had to reference two different manuals in order to figure out how to create
> (and destroy) a PL/SQL stored procedure, for example. Lack of explicit support
> for replication is a pain too, though it's no worse than any other embedded
> database (i.e., a 'modified' field and an explicit procedure can be used to do
> it).
>
> The biggest minus for the back-end of a b2b web site, though, would be the
> fact that it is bog-slow at opening a connection. PostGreSQL forks a new
> process for each connection, and the new process must do all sorts of things
> to establish authentication etc... PHP3's PostGres support gets around this by
> creating "persistent" connections that hang around with the Apache process,
> but I have no idea if Python's Apache module support is robust enough to
> handle this situation. Not to mention that Python's Apache module support is
> almost entirely undocumented... it is quite unclear, for example, how to run
> your former Python CGI scripts via the PyApache module.
>
> My basic conclusion is that PostGreSQL makes a fine alternative to current
> embedded databases. It has better functionality than the xBase types, and
> unless you need massive bulk inserts, the performance is excellent.  On the
> other hand, I personally would not use Python with PostGreSQL and Apache for
> implementing a b2b web site. Python with ZOPE/Zserver and PostGreSQL, however,
> might be reasonable (I have not investigated that yet).
>
> --
> Eric Lee Green                         eric at estinc.com
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