Merlin Moncure

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since March 18, 2005

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March 18, 2005, on Database Management Systems:
I agree with the above poster in that the author is confusing SQL DBMS or a relational database. However I can forgive the author for this because this is so common in the industry (even if he is from MIT). The slowness of most databases while inserting is because most database systems force the data to disk after each insert. This is a safety 'feature' not a performance 'bug' and has nothing to do with performance. Simply wrapping the entire load process in a trasaction should have fixed the problem. The Author's comments about PostgreSQL not being scalable is commercial systems are incorrect. PostgreSQL implemented write-ahead-logging (which is what he is talking about) with version 7.2 in 2002. Also, PostgreSQL has MVCC which makes it very, very scabale...some commerical implementations do not even have this, for example MS SQL server. Merlin