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Comment by hkarthik | Hacker News Reader

Such comparisons are often difficult since MySQL and Postgres typical perform significantly better on Unix based systems than they do on Windows. Also using the Windows/.NET libraries for connections tend to perform worse even if the database server itself is hosted a Unix box.

In general, I would say you should stay on MSSQL if your server environments are Windows and only look at the OSS alternatives if you're willing (and able) to make a full stack switch to Unix.

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At the company I work for we are currently in the process of migrating from MSSQL to PostgreSQL. However, we are trickling to a full stack switch to Linux. In the meantime, the Postgres databases have performed extremely well and on balance we are happy with it.

Unfortunately I would argue that at an enterprise level MSSQL is better than Postgres (pure conjecture here). If nothing else, it is way easier to employ MSSQL experts where I live and next to impossible to find Postgres talent. This pretty much means that we are learning by trial and error what the best practices are.

If you need remote Postgres talent, go to the source: www.EnterpriseDB.com

Actually, there's quite a few companies that offer professional PG support, there's a list on the official PostgreSQL page:

http://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_support/

Great to hear that your company is forward thinking and willing to make the considerable investment to get off the MS Stack.

You might have more luck finding some Oracle DBAs and training them up on PostGres. There's a lot of similarities between the two, and PG/SQL is also very similar to PL/SQL.

Well we do currently use .net but I asked a question the other week on here about different languages etc and one good piece of advice I got was to create a REST service and interact with that.

We have put a lot of thought into it and we were going to give it a go with WCF and REST but I don't see any issue why we cannot buy a UNIX box and put Postgresql on it and put a layer on it with some other language serving the REST?

I will be benchmarking this with a current customer who has over 1 million products and a lot of visitors a day to see how it stands up against MSSQL, we are quite sensible into not jumping into decisions so I appreciate your comment and it shall definitely be part of the benchmark.

Having spent the better part of 3 years creating REST services with .NET, I strongly recommend you do NOT use traditional WCF. The WCF Web API stuff looks interesting but still seems immature. I've found ASP.NET MVC to be the best tool for creating REST apis.

Thanks for the advice

I have found the routing in MVC and their returns types (JSON etc) working really well to be honest, I will take a look at that

Thanks

Even MVC is a little heavy and you don't get a lot of things for free with it. Compare it to some of the Java OSS projects like Enunciate and it still requires a lot of extra work.

On the .NET side, I would suggest looking at Demis Ballot's excellent Service Stack library. http://www.servicestack.net/

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