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[Derek Broughton]

Knapp wrote:

>>  I'm going to hate myself in the morning, but I agree...
>>
>>  I should explain :-)  I live off-grid, so I don't actually have the
>>  resources to run a 24/7 server - either electricity or Internet access.
> 
> Can't say much about your internet access but even off the grid you
> can run a lap top off some batteries and a solar panel! :-) Power
> consumption is really low with laptops and you don't need a new fancy
> one to run a little server.

Oh, really?  I'm afraid you also can't say much about off-grid power
consumption :-)  I worry about wall-warts.  I have _finally_ decided I can
live with the permanent consumption of a Linksys router (only because I
can't be bothered to go to the attic to switch it off when I'm not using
it - I should really run a switch).  My _total_ daily electrical
consumption is 2KwH.  I produce that with about 50 sq.ft. of solar panels.
My laptop - not as efficient as some, but far less than many - draws 60W
with the display on.  60W x 24 hours = 1440wH - i.e., 75% of my total daily
capacity!  I haven't attempted to figure out what the draw might be with
the display off, but surely more than half that.

>>  Plone.
> 
> Why Plone over Django? 

I can't even begin to say.  I haven't compared them.  I don't even know if
the _do_ compare - but Plone can make nice websites with minimal effort.

> This is not my area of expertise but I 
> understood Plone to take more time to learn to use plus knowledge of
> Zope on top of python.

I don't know Django.  I like Plone :-)  If you actually have to do any
_programming_ it's a bear.  A big ugly smelly bear.  

>>  > Want something bigger try postgreSQL with apache2 and Django.
>>
>>  Postgresql is not very big for what you get.  I do a lot of SQL
>>  development, and I can't believe the difference between trying to do
>>  anything in Oracle and the same in Postgre.
> 
> Can you say more about this? What is the difference that you have
> seen? I have never used Oracle but I would like to hear about it and
> the why of what you are saying.

Well, Postgres can do virtually everything that Oracle can do on the
database end.  Oracle then has this huge infrastructure that does things
I'll never care about or even understand.  So oracle-xe is a 405MB package. 
postgresql-8.2 is 12.1MB.  When I start oracle-xe, I get an entire
web-server to support it (that only really works with IE browsers).  When I
start postgresql, I don't - but I have all the tools readily available
anyway.  I knew somebody who implemented an application back in the late
90s on postgres - and it blew up really messily a few weeks later when the
database hit 4TB (I think it could handle that now, but I wouldn't know). 
Oracle could handle that without blinking - but it runs some 30 processes
on my system (this little laptop!) to be able to.  One of the fun features
is that I can't run Windows XP in virtualbox, to get an IE session to
administer my Oracle server - not enough memory for all that.

I have got to the point where for development (most of which is still
targeted to Oracle systems) I copy the database structures to Postgres,
develop with postgres, then run integration tests with the Oracle server. 
I also run mysql occasionally, but ime, it _can't_ do everything I'd do
with Oracle.
> 
> I don't know what you would have to be doing to overload PostgreSQL.
> On the other side of this, it is nowhere near as light as Sqlite.  Of
> course Sqlite does not have the power of PostgreSQL but most user
> sites (I would ever say most pro sites) don't need that power and they
> do need the memory and CPU time.

You're probably right.
> 
> Before you need the rest of this, keep in mind that all the tests I
> could find on the web were out of date often within the test the
> software tested was from different years! We all know how much a
> distro can change in a one year! Think about that with some of these
> tests between software that is 2 years out of sink!
> 
> I thought this was telling and humorous about PostgreSQL vs Oracle.
> Note that Oracle was stated to run 15% faster in this test but the
> hardware was hard to compare. Price includes hardware and software but
> not the team that tuned the test. "So effectively, you can still get
> slightly better performance by using Oracle on commodity hardware. You
> just pay $120,000 to gain an incremental amount of performance. But

Yes, I'd have to agree with that.  I run oracle-xe which is free for my
purposes, but when you get into paying licenses, it's astronomical.

>
http://www.kaltenbrunner.cc/blog/index.php?/archives/21-8.3-vs.-8.2-a-simple-benchmark.html
> 
> 
> To sum this all up and state what I see:
> Best for complex big system databases in order first being best.
> Oracle, PostgreSQL, Mysql, SQlite
> Best for simple uses and really high speed uses.
> SQlite, Mysql, PostgrSQL, Oracle.

I'm not convinced that mysql can ever come ahead of postgres, but my
knowledge is about as out of date as you mention above.  Otherwise, I'd
agree.
 
> Last note: Oracle is really expansive and needs special hardware and
> might not be faster than PostGreSQL now.

It no longer needs special hardware.  It can run on any Linux system and is
certified on Ubuntu.  They're even pushing their own "Oracle Unbreakable
Linux".
-- 
derek