See http://www.tcx.se/benchmark.html for some interesting benchmarks comparing several common db systems including oracle, ms-sql, pgsql, and others.
For a pretty comprehensive comparison of database system limitations and capabilities, see http://www.tcx.se/crash-me-choose.htmy I use MySQL for my work and am extremely happy with it. It is extrememly reliable and extremely fast. It is significantly faster than pgsql and in my experience, it is also much more reliable (I used pgsql before I switched to MySQL). MySQL doesn't support some of Oracle's features like transactions, views, etc, but since I don't need them, I can benefit from the much smaller and faster MySQL system. MySQL has no problems dealing with large sets of data and large BLOBS. I have one MySQL db that contains over 3.5GB of data. In that db, two of the tables are over 1.5GB (they contain mostly TIFF images). Performance is great even with those relatively large table sizes. -Kevin -- Kevin Cheek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> University of Michigan, Department of Internal Medicine Divisions of Rheumatology and Molecular Medicine & Genetics Jeff Noxon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Thu, Nov 19, 1998 at 04:58:00PM +0000, Martin Oldfield wrote: > > Does anyone have a feel for the relative performance of the various > > SQL databases in Debian ? I'd also be interested to know how these > > compare to something like Oracle (under either NT or Linux). > > > > I'm looking to manage two databases: one of roughly ten thousand > > records a few k in size, the other 100,000 rather smaller records. It > > might well be feasible to use something like gdbm for the latter one. > > Postgresql runs like greased lightning. In some tests involving > 0.5 million records of a few K in size, it blew away MS SQL Server. > I think it was version 6. Postgresql runs well, although it does have > some limitations. ODBC was the main weakness I noticed. We're currently > deploying Oracle on a Debian server... > > Oracle is bloatware even by Microsoft standards. I can't comment on > speed yet. > > Good luck, > > Jeff
