If anyone even remotely involved with the maintenance and development of pg reads this thread - Thank you! - for all your efforts in building and improving a first class product that keeps me amazed at the strides it takes with each major. release.
It is strange that there aren't more writeups on Postgresql migrations.
Yandex had a good one. Posted here a long while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489055
It's probably because switching databases is very painful and rare.
Speaking of economic incentives.
That could be a thesis topic for my hereto unwritten PhD in Behavioral Economics:
"Choosing to pay" What are the behavioral aspects of top leadership - Why do people still chose proprietary" A quantitative case study."
Right now anyone can afford a db server with 128gb ram, enough to solve most problems #YourDataFitsInRam
Could you explain ?
Personally I use Oracle (and hopefully one day PG) because it gives me guarantees on data integrity and these guarantees help me to think about my programs more easily.
In the early 2000s, a serious database machine -- say, a Sun E10000 - had up to 64 CPUs, running at 400-500MHz each, 64 GB of RAM, and a huge cabinet full of disks.
Now you can call up a SuperMicro VAR and order a 64-core AMD EPYC server with 2TB of RAM and 4 TB of NVMe drives, that talks to other machines over a 100Gb/s ethernet, for a price around the same as a used Tesla S85.
If your database is under 2TB, it all fits in RAM on commodity hardware, where commodity is defined as "anyone with a credit card can order it without even talking to sales".
I didn't know that. At that time I was discovering Applesoft basic :-)
sudo apt-get install postgresql
was amazing to me!
docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' -e 'SA_PASSWORD=password' -p 1433:1433 -d microsoft/mssql-server-linux
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server
sudo apt-get install mssql-serverInsult to injury, if you're using Docker in a VM (as you must on a Mac) the instructions on that Docker Hub page say you need a minimum of 3.25GB RAM dedicated to the VM. That's quite a heavy lift if all you want is a database instance for local development.
And then sure, you could run SQL Server on Linux for your production instances, but you're well off the beaten path. You're going to have to roll your own infrastructure rather than relying on AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Heroku, etc etc. And the moment you have a performance problem the first advice you'll hear seems likely to be "try it on Windows and see if it reproduces there".
(I'm a huge pg fan if that isn't clear - just ...)
It seems you're just guessing on that last part though - SQL Server has been in production for decades and already has lots of tooling and there are even new CLIs available for the Linux environment. Production SQL Server comes with support from MS, you're definitely not on your own nor will they just tell you to run it on Windows, this is simply not how enterprise support works and they would have a hard time staying in business with answers like that.
We can discuss support issues but it's best to leave the assumptions and hyperbole out of it.
I'm sure you're right that MS would be happy to sell support. What I don't see is a reason to care, unless I run in to a Windows app that can't use another DB that I suddenly need to run under Linux.
> ...SQL Server on Linux for your production instances, but you're well off the beaten path...first advice you'll hear seems likely to be "try it on Windows and see if it reproduces there"...
You dont think this is hyperbole? Have you actually used SQL Server or Microsoft support before? They do not treat enterprise customers this way and both Linux and MSSQL have plenty of tooling available. There's nothing challenging here.
> What I don't see is a reason to care
You're not the target market then. MSSQL has some compelling features and a big ecosystem, adding cross-platform support and a much easier installation process only helps customers with more options for deployment.
curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "$(curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list)"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-server
sudo /opt/mssql/bin/mssql-conf setup
sudo apt-get install -y mssql-tools unixodbc-dev
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
All of that is on top of the issues of how heavyweight it is due to containing a platform abstraction layer that consists of a very large amount of Windows running in user mode, as discussed by others in this thread.
I'm surprised at how many people seem to have taken issue with a simple comment. Postgres is easy to install... and now so is MSSQL compared to the complex slow GUI installer they had before. Maybe it'll help the original commenter, maybe not. Let's just leave it at that.
> I'm surprised at how many people seem to have taken issue with a simple comment.
The thing is, that you must migrate your database between major pgsql releases and you don't want your distro to force it on you. The community pgsql repo has the same rules - you have separate repo for each major release, so no surprises either.
I took the chance to upgrade our PostgreSQL instance. It took less than an hour. It was a smaller database, but the difference in complexity was still impressive.