Grumpy Guide to Databases

Grumpy Guide to Databases

Posted Jul 16, 2004 20:20 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (guest, #3071)
In reply to: Grumpy? by corbet
Parent article: A look at PostgreSQL

I find it difficult to imagine a topic more fraught with pitfalls, due to
the impressive complexity of the subject matter and the wide range of
users needs. It's also the only topic I can think of that's likely to
result in MORE fuss than a KDE/GNOME article.

Such an article would need to extremely clearly set out the evaluation
criteria, user experience, and user needs before beginning. Comparing
feature lists is IMHO almost useless without knowing what those features
will do for you. Even constructing feature tables is almost impossible to
do in a way that is both comprehensive and vaguely comprehensible (ie not
a 5000 entry table) because what to one person is irrelevent is to another
person the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Also, lots of the things people say about databases are quite subjective.
For example, one frequently hears MySQL being described as incredibly
fast... but that depends to a huge extent on your workload. It's very fast
for many SELECTS on tables that don't see much write activity, but pays
for that in write performance, especially for concurrent clients. At
least, that's my impression. Therein lying the root of the problem - good,
meaningful benchmarks (especially up-to-date ones) are hard to come by.

Meh. It'd still be a really interesting article, it suspect it'd just be a
huge job to do well.

---

(Log in to post comments)