We've been using a servlet/JSP app with a commercial database for a couple of years, but the db has been giving us trouble and we're thinking about moving, but what to we don't know. Right now, we just have a single Windows web server running
Tomcat and a Linux server running our db. We're taking a hard look at PostgreSQL, but as you know, when you visit all these db vendors' sites, they all start sounding the same (it seems like it's hard to get a handle on hard performance benchmarks). Frankly, we don't know what we need.
Our site has thousands of users in all continental US time zones (some daily, some not) that use a web app, and the main core operation they perform reads from a few tables and then writes to a couple of tables with every one of these operations. There are over 11,000 of these per day at the moment, with quite a bit of other db transactions as well (updating profiles, changing preferences, etc). Most of the transactions happen between 7am EST and 8pm EST, but there are definite peak times, especially near the end of the business day. The number of transactions has tripled in the past year, and I figure it could at least double in the next year. All of the SQL consists of simple INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements with no joins or anything else remotely complex (because of some ODBC non-compliance stuff, we do a couple of things in
Java in memory that might normally be done when querying the database).
So, I know we're definitely not serving up a complex financial app or a web app used by employees of a Fortune 100 company or something else on a huge enterprise scale, but I know we get some pretty steady traffic. Basically, how busy is our database? Might we need Oracle or DB2, or should something like PostgreSQL suffice? You can definitely factor in how easy to learn a particular database is. I've read that Oracle brought out a new small business version that's supposed to be really easy to administer when you're not an Oracle DBA. Then again, maybe a PostgreSQL book or two would be enough to get us by...
I would love some gut feeling responses from any of you. You are welcome to tell me how a particular database failed you at some points but all in all worked pretty well or whatever...you know that's really probably more helpful than just hearing how wonderful a database is! For example, if a database performs great but has lots of
JDBC problems, then that's not so great for us. Thanks for any help...
[ October 19, 2004: Message edited by: Stephen Huey ]