Pervasive vs. other relational db

[valo]

Hi all, I have been requested to provide some information about the benefits of continue working with our pervasive databases, we have had a lot of corruption problems and the administration is tired of paying external help, they want to switch to other RDBMS as Oracle, SQL Server or Sybase, do you know where can I find information about comparisions between Pervasive and the other ones ?

Thanks in advance.

Valo

 

[TomKane]

I think I saw some documents on the Pervasive web site about that..... I think it's probably no suprise that they show Pervasive in a good light. No disrespect intended.

I think that if you are considering keeping Pervasive then it might be worthwhile getting to the bottom of the corruption problems.

I used to support an application that used Btrieve and the site in question had terrible problems with corruption and it turned out that the version of Btrieve was unsuitable for the platform they were running the app on. Once this was sorted out then the problems went away.

To migrate from one database system to another could be a fairly big undertaking and it may turn out to be cheaper to stick with what you had IF you can figure out what is going wrong on Pervasive. It's not as if, say, SQL Server is perfect either and if you look at the forum on this site you'll find that there are a lot of users out there with various problems....

Just to qualify what I am saying we use both Pervasive and SQL server and we have no major problems with either. I'm not boasting, just saying that both systems can do the job asked of them

 

[grnelson]

I have to agree with Tom on the situation with Pervasive. I've used it for over 10 years and only had a few corruptions and that was under the older engine. Since we've been on PSQL 2000i we have not had any problems. Of course the reason we moved to this was we moved from Novell to Windows 2000 using the 6.15 workstation engine and are problems started to increase. So if you are using an older version you might consider moving to the current version of Pervasive Btrieve.
Gil

 

[ecichy]

I have been using Pervasive since the Softcraft Btrieve days and have had minimal problems. The few corruptions which I have seen have come from disk drive I/O errors, and more commonly, simultaneous access to data with different versions of the Pervasive/Btrieve engine. Version 6.15, in my opinion, was not a very good release, as it was the first release by the Novell spinoff of Btrieve Technologies. The current version of Pervasive SQL 2000i has been trouble free for my clients.

 

[Dilyias]

In regards to your corruption - do you have the latest SP4 + hotfix? Have you butil save/recover and loaded the affected databases to clean them of the corruptions?

I prefer Sql Server to Pervasive 2000i in practically every way except Pervasive is easy maintenence. You just let it sit there and it keeps on ticking. Bear in mind that I've used Sql Server much longer than Pervasive.

Of course, when it comes to complex queries, import/export, I have found Sql Server (2000) to be hundreds times faster, has much better SQL, stored proc, view, etc... support. Much better administration tools.

There is also less configuring to do - it will use as much mem as needed but not too much, or you can tell it how much memory you want it to use, when to do multiple cpu queries, # of threads, etc..

But the cost of moving to Sql Server may be more than just sticking with Pervasive and paying the extra man hours here and there. And also re-writing the apps that use Pervasive, assuming that they don't access it via simple ODBC.

 

[Smcmanus2001]

I figured I may as well put my 2 cents in.

I have been working with Pervasive Products for about 6 years, back in the Btrieve 6.15 years. We have gone from 6.15 to 7 to 2000i, planning on V8. 5.5 of those years were at a company with a SQL database as well as the Pervasive. The SQL Database was working for 5 people max, the Pervasive was working for 40+ people, a Live Satellite feed, as well as running the Web Site with 50,000 hits a month, all from the same database. And 95% of the time the Access was instant no matter what the load, we have had maybe 30 minutes down time in 6 years (basically self inflicted), and No Data Corruption, even though we have had hard downs on the Database on 2 occasions. Recently at my current employ, there was a small issue that was fixed with the UTinyInt and USmallInt, with returning the wrong value, (which our code wrote back to the databse). But that has been our only issue.
SQL on the other hand, has been HELL, but that could be partially because the App was Platinum a accounting package. The SQL database down for 2 days once because the Logs were not being truncated, and problems are hell to diagnose(for us anyway, unless you can afford to hire a Dedicated SQL DB admin).
I don't think your problem will go away with the new database. Problems always follow migrations. (something like bilge rats, they follow the ship