On Tue, Apr 02, 2002 at 10:02:22AM -0500, Eron Lloyd wrote:
Very interesting. I think I've read about this somewhere before. The claim of "4x faster than PostgreSQL" raised my brow. It is true that Gadfly is becoming quite stale, and only supports a *very* limited subset of SQL. It also would be nice to see something a bit more robust than just shelve in the Standard Library. Gadfly is ok to begin a prototype in, but frustrating once you quickly hit a glass ceiling in functionality. I'm interested in seeing how well it can scale, versus Postgres, however. Any experience?
Scale, as in multiuser? Hardly at all: it's an SQL library that accesses a single, textbased, flatfile for the entire database. From the FAQ, multiple readers are allowed (on Unix), but the entire file (yes, that's the whole database, not a single table) is locked for one backend to write. As a lightweight replacement for gadfly, it looks like it might be pretty good. Note that the scripting language of choice of the author seems to be Tcl, rather than Python. This probably explains the 'everything is a string' approach :-) The speed comparisions with PostgreSQL are very much an apples vs. fish sort of thing: the pgsql server was not tuned _at all_, and does a whole lot more that was never tested, such as multi-user writer access. Ross