The Mises Institute’s website needs to upgrade to MS-SQL 2005, but the price ($5,417.99) is rather forbidding, despite the vast improvements in speed and new features that the program would offer (it is capable of running more than 1.5 million transactions per minute). Therefore: we are looking for a supporter who will make this possible. This donation can be made as an in-kind or financial contribution, and, either way, it is tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law. Write us if you would like to help.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/4391/mises-org-needs-ms-sql-2005/
Mises.org needs MS-SQL 2005
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You can get a free copy by attending a Microsoft Launch Event. It looks like the only event that hasn’t been sold out yet is in Minneapolis on 12/14.
I got one, it comes with a 1 client access license. We need a per-processor license for the web server.
MS-SQL? Hardly. MySQL and Postgres are both available and, at least MySQL is available on Windows.
I would have thought that the remarkable success of your Linux system blog.mises.org would have shown you that there are better things to spend money on than commodity software.
For the purposes of running the website, I’d also suggest looking into MySQL or PostgreSQL (PostgreSQL is more stable/reliable). Btw, seems like PostgreSQL’s also available on Windows. However, there may be very difficult issues with migrating from MS-SQL to MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Considering the number of people/systems being so migrated, the MySQL/Postgres communities are likely to have a wealth of experience in those issues. Likely even someone who could tailor the scripts for a lot less than $5K.
What the supporters of PostgreSQL are neglecting here is the lack of commercial grade support that comes with MS SQL Server. MySQL offers commercial support, but this product is not quite in the same league as MS SQL Server in terms of the number of transactions per second.
Bruce,
PostgreSQL does have commercial support available for purchase. Of course, I don’t know of Dave Veksler needs it (and it may not make sense to purchase support until u know that you’ll need it).
David,
Thank you; I was not aware of it. I would think that the support would be worth it for a site as huge and popular as mises.org.
It seems that there are three fundamental issues:
(1) Will the webserver application work with Postgres or MySQL?
(2) Does the Mises website require 1.5 million txns/min? Although I don’t know the Mises traffic, it seems unlikely to me that it has traffic rates that would drive anywhere close to 25000 hits/second to the database.
(3) What is the difference in quality of support between the Microsoft product and Postgres or MySQL?
Speaking not as an certified geek but a mere manager, a transition to an open-source model would involve unthinkable expense (Mises.org is an old-growth tree, not a sappling), and everything I’ve heard about ms-sql2005 sounds just wonderful to me.
Right now, Mises.org is on the cutting edge in speed, stability, and functionality, not to mention content and quality. But it would be very sad to see that in six months we are suddenly falling behind, and it can happen. I’ve never regretted a single upgrade. It has always been to the advantage of users, managers, and everyone. But this time, it does seem beyond our means.
“Unthinkable expense”? Rather, unknown.
I can easily agree with “staying with what you know works”. But don’t count out the stability and reliability of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/Postgress, Python/Perl/PHP) stack.
As with blog.mises.org, next time there is a hardware change I suggest building it with more, ah, accessable tools than MS provides.
Why not give MSDE( maybe called the community version now) a try. It is mssql light. As long as you dont require more than 4 gigs of datastorage per database, more than 1 cpu and more than a gig of ram it will work basically the same.
Mr. Tucker, moving to PostgreSQL would not require moving to an open-source platform. See the case-study referenced below where PostgreSQL is used on a Windows server with an ASP application.
The primary factor limiting performance of a database server is the number of simultaneous connections that can be supported, usually limited by available RAM. Isn’t it true that Microsoft’s SQL server allows only a limited number of parallel transactions?
Using an open-source and freely available relational database management server such as PostgreSQL, would allow Mises.org to support as many simultaneous connections as the hardware would allow. PostgreSQL won’t punish Mises.org for being popular. Rather, modify the simple configuration files to allow a greater number of connections. PostgreSQL on FreeBSD supports the ODBC protocol, which should enable it to be a snap-in replacement for Microsoft’s server, even within the .NET framework. If not, I would consider that rigidity a limitation of Microsoft’s development architecture.
Consider the cited case-study of converting Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 applications to a PostgreSQL backend. Conversion of a Microsoft SQL/ASP applications to PostgreSQL
PostgreSQL works and hardly needs the “commercial support” reportedly included with Microsoft’s offerings. Do inform me the first time a Microsoft technical support representative gives advice on 2nd order normalization or proper indexing for performance, topics helpful to the database administrator seeking better performance. The best expense of money with regard to Microsoft is to pay someone to replace it throughout your local workplace.
It is further recommended to spend some of the requested $5,000 on optimizing the existing application to reduce load on the database server. One thousand dollars spent on creativity can easily save the expense of more hardware or more expensive software.
That’s the first I realized that mises.org was not using a 3rd party hosting provider.
Too bad about needing per-processor licensing. I’d be happy to send you my free launch event SQL and could round up a few more otherwise to start adding up those 1 CAL
. Only a single proc though? (MS lists $6K/proc for Standard, and I assume you got a small break?)
MSDE has been replaced with SQL Server 2005 Express. It will not support multiprocessor, and I believe has licensing restrictions as well that would prevent it from being usable in this case.
I just finished doing an access to mysql transition for work, the entire exercise took me about 3 hours to complete.
You have to export each table to a csv style format then write a php script to read the file and slot each field of the text file database into the mysql database.
Very simple
Somehow I find it ironic that LvMI would still wish to pay even more tribute and stay in bondage to (Redmond) Washington rather than seek freedom.
Really, if you are utterly faithless in small things – preferring a comfortable and expensive bondage rather than expending some effort to be free in this, why should I have any respect for your work to free people from the welfare-warfare state? That is going to be much harder. If you don’t want the freedom that comes with opensource software, why do you seem to value the freedom that would come without the state?
You are asking for $5k+ to stay bound to Microsoft. Have you thought of asking for donations for a transition to free software? Or try both and get pledges and whoever meets the goal first is the way you could go, assuming you like competition and choice.
Or why not ask the corporation or B&MGates foundation for a free license since you seem to support their right to be a monopoly?
Oh crud! TZ, please forgive my other postings on the subject, it’s clear from the above that you do indeed understand what F/OSS is, even if you don’t understand its functioning as another facet of the free market.
Since this article directly addresses other issues which this here blog entry brings up, I’ll post the link here too: Open Source Rules of Sales and Marketing http://www.line56.com/articles/default.asp?articleID=7157&TopicID=4
Really, if you are utterly faithless in small things – preferring a comfortable and expensive bondage rather than expending some effort to be free in this, why should I have any respect for your work to free people from the welfare-warfare state?
Now, I use postgreSQL and love it, and I wouldn’t trade it for MS-SQL on servers at home or at work if you paid me. Well, it would take quite an incentive, anyway.
But that’s me. If the folks at Mises think their time is better spent doing other things, and spending $5k on MS-SQL, that’s their _choice_ that they are _free_ to make. They certainly aren’t making it for anyone else. I would choose differently, but I’m not going to hold it against them… and I fail to see how their work is undermined in the slightest by making that choice.
Actually, as a non-profit organization you can acquire SQL Server 2005 rather cheaply through Microsoft’s Software Donation Program (http://www.microsoft.com/Industry/Government/softwaredonation.mspx).
Rob, thanks so much for this tip. We’ve not had much luck with this in the past but i’ll certainly look into today!
Well, I’ve spent the last hour trying to find out if MS-SQL 2005 is part of this program but it doesn’t look promising. If anyone has further ideas, I’m all ears.
Ok, I’ve confirmed that MS-SQL 2005 is not available at a discount for non-profits.
Jeff asked me to chime on this, so here are a few words on why I prefer Microsoft SQL Server over open-source solutions.
First, let me say that I have been running a Debian LAMP server for a while, so I have some experience with MySQL (but not PostgreSQL) When I need to host a busy website, money is tight, and a free CMS is suitable, LAMP can be a good solution.
However, when I can afford it, and especially when custom development is required, open source cannot compete with the .Net/SQL Server platform. There is no single advantage of using Microsoft products – rather, the whole package offers a much better value for the cost than LAMP. The most important benefits to me (the developer/administrator) is the integrated development environment provided by Visual Studio.Net/SQL Server, the powerful maintenance tools, the confidence in long-term support, and their superior performance. With Mises.org in particular, having graphical administration tools is also crucial, because it is run mostly by non-technical users.
As an example of the integrated environment Microsoft offers, I can do things that are simply not feasible with LAMP. I can visually create a web application in Visual Studio much faster than I could with PHP or Java, upload the files, and be confident that it will work exactly as it does on my workstation – now, and 10 years later, with no custom configuration.
SQL Server in particular offers features that blow away every other database out there. Mises.org in particular makes liberal use of use stored procedures, transaction logs, views, foreign keys constrains, cursors, user-defined functions, and other T-SQL features that are just not available with MySQL. We also need to have nightly backups, database file maintenance, and other admin features without editing any script files. Sometimes, I need to export a database to Excel or provide an Access front-end – this may be possible with MySQL, but it’s not nearly as easy.
In terms of performance, Mises.org doesn’t need an e-commerce grade server, but we can only afford a moderate hardware, so we need to make efficient use of our hardware. SQL server caches up to 1GB of data in memory, and .Net caches up to 400GB more. The result is that when Mises.org was Slashdotted twice this year, there was no noticeable performance degradation. Can Apache/MySQL do this – out of the box, with a single server?
Understood on Win/.NET/SQL/etc. I’m a fan of .NET especially as well. If $ is a major concern there is the possibility of a hybrid where Win/.NET is used with a MySQL or other free db. Sproc porting and db management would still be significant, but it would not be nearly as drastic a move as moving to complete LAMP.
On the sticking with SQL Server front, have you ruled out the $3800 workgroup edition? It has a 2GB RAM, 2 CPU limit and lacks some data mining and server mirroring features, but it might be worth investigating if you haven’t already determined it won’t suffice for the site’s needs.
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