Ten minute database
It a party at Mike’s place tonight. There hasn’t been a party at “Mike’s place” since the end of second year when he insisted that everyone come over to his dorm room to celebrate the end of life in “traditional residence”.
I had about 15 minutes before some other friends showed up, one of whom typically steals all your liquor when you’re not looking. Of course, he’s still a good guy, but I digress. So I decided to take the plunge and give the new PostgreSQL a try on my laptop.
Total compile time was 10 minutes, 58 seconds. I’m serious. I just compiled an enterprise level database in under eleven minutes. What are the chances that Oracle compiles in under eleven minutes on my P4 2GHz laptop? Not likely. Sybase? Even less likely; it has trouble running let alone compiling.
It took longer to dump, zip and restore the database on my laptop than it did to compile the latest version of PostgreSQL. And the dump/restore process was flawless.
I’m sure this isn’t the case for all open-source projects, but when I can compile a complex application in a short span of time on an average system, then I think it’s safe to say that this is a great example of what OSS is capable of. I know compile time isn’t everything. In the end you want performance and features and reliability. But what if you got all those (as is the case with PostgreSQL and it compiled in under eleven minutes? Amazing.
Sun, 23 Jan 2005 03:11 Posted in Technology
