Anthony Baxter wrote at 2004-9-2 18:15 +1000:
On Wed, 1 Sep 2004 21:26:07 +0200, Dieter Maurer <dieter@handshake.de> wrote:
When I had to work with Oracle 3 years ago, I have been *VERY* disappointed (this was Oracle 8i). Despite its high costs (100.000 USD), it was almost unfunctional: ... * memory corruption inside the Oracle client libraries brought our Zope down within minutes of use
Haven't seen this since we stopped using Oracle on Linux, and even then, it was far far less frequent than that - maybe once a month or so.
Our Oracle run on Solaris. All reported problems have been for this combination.
...
* some combinations of relational and full text subqueries let Oracle forget about its indexes. For example: while a query "Q1 and Q2" took seconds (Oracle recognized that it had indexes) the query "Q1 or Q2" (with the same "Q1" and "Q2") took days (!) (because Oracle had forgotten about the indexes and used full table scans -- which is a bad idea with hundread of millions of records and hundreds of gigabyte of data).
Did you use the "explain plan" functionality? Was this with the rule-based or cost-based optimiser?
The "explain plan" revealed that Oracle used indexes for the "and" query but does full table scans for the "or" query. I know longer know the details -- it is almost three years back.
... I like postgres, but my main problem is finding DBAs with sufficient PG knowledge.
There is almost no knowledge necessary. Unlike Oracle which has hundreds or even thousands of tuning parameters, Postgres has a few dozens -- and even when the parameters are not well chosen, Postgres runs acceptably. When Oracle is not well customized, you get catastrophic behaviour. -- Dieter