Shop Talk: 2024-11-04

The Recording

The Panelists

  • Kevin Feasel
  • Mike Chrestensen

Notes: Questions and Topics

TriPASS Call for Speakers

The TriPASS 2025 call for speakers is open. We are accepting sessions for all three of our groups: the advanced DBA group (2nd Tuesday of each month), main meeting (3rd Tuesday of each month), and data science & business intelligence group (4th Tuesday of each month).

Why SQL Server vs PostgreSQL?

Our topic for the night was from Alex. Repeating the question:

In a recent shop Talk Mike Chrestensen mentioned that he is working on a project to migrate from Oracle to SQL Server. I’m curious what led him to choose SQL Server instead of PostgreSQL or some other open source ($0 licensing cost) DBMS.

Mike talked about the specific circumstances around his company. From there, I dove into the topic and explained my reasoning for why someone might want to choose SQL Server or PostgreSQL. I didn’t use the obvious “We’re already using this technology” answer, but instead focused on some of the key items in favor of each. I also talked about a bit of history at a prior employer.

An Overview of HammerDB

We also talked about a great tool for comparison testing of hardware & relational database products called HammerDB. This is an open-source solution that uses the TPC-C (OLTP-style queries) and TPC-H (OLAP-style queries) workloads. The UI is a bit rough, but the tool is powerful and is a lot easier than trying to figure out how to replicate your own workload in a non-production environment.

In the News

Mala shared an article on the 50th anniversary of SQL as a language. And I tossed in an article concerning software liability in the EU.

2 Replies to “Shop Talk: 2024-11-04”

  1. I used Hammer recently on Postgres and it found it about 50% as fast as SQL 2019 both on my box with same RAM and drives

    1. I could definitely see that, especially if there was no optimization done on the Postgres instance. I’d imagine that the numbers would be a lot closer with ideal configurations for both.

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