Star Interview with the PostgreSQL Team
Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Mon 21st Apr 2003 17:26 UTC
Original OSNews Interviews PostgreSQL is a robust, next-generation, Object-Relational DBMS (ORDBMS), derived from the Berkeley Postgres database management system. "PostgreSQL is one of the best-managed open source projects out there" a friend-in-the-know told me about 2 years ago, so today we feature a mini-interview with five members of the PostgreSQL team about their plans on the popular DB.
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This is crazy, the PostgreSQL ppl actually believe that their competition is commercial databases? When PostgreSQL's WAL work is done and stabilized,

It is done. Has been for well over a year.

and they have an equivlant operational mode to Oracle's archivelog mode then they have taken the first step.

There are working development models of this, it is called Point in Time recovery.

After you get rolling forward your database down (with the tools to parse your logs too, so you know when to stop rolling forward the db) you have to address hot backups.

pg_dump does hot backups, and quite nicely.

Let’s face it the commercial guys are doing incremental hot backups with tools that ship with the DB for years, and incremental backups will be handled by the PITR system.

and vanilla hot backups have been around for a decade now.

And Postgresql has had them about that long too.

This makes PostgreSQL a non-starter for anyone with any valuable data. No, it makes it a non-starter for people who can't be bothered to implelent replication and a good backup schedule. Only a tiny percentage of all the biggest databases need the kind of PITR recovery you talk about, most get along fine with normal nightly backups and replication. In fact, about 99% of our Oracle instances at work are strictly backed up at night. Postgresql isn't good enough for those 99%? I think it is.

Transactions are not enough; you also have to have a coherent backup and recovery strategy to ensure your data’s integrity.

Hey, what do ya know, we agree on something! :-)