Is there a future for Pervasive?

[frasse7]

Hi all,

my company must decide whether to use Pervasive or MS SQL Server for a number of development projects that are about to start (client/server).

We have both of them but only one application runs on Pervasive (V8) for now. My preference is MSSQL since I know much about it.

The projects involve among other things creating a large searchable database for a smaller number of simultaneous users. As far as I know MSSQL is capable of this and I believe Pervasive gets the job done as well. Although we've heard Pervasive is faster (at least when you use these transactions(?))

My questions are:
Is it worth the extra time of development to learn how to master Pervasive when we got MSSQL skills? Is it worth going for? Will we be happy in the end?

Do we have to use the transaction engine approach to notice any difference?

Is there a future for Pervasive or will everyone use MSSQL and Oracle?

I don't know much about Pervasive, and I keep comparing it to MSSQL which makes me "dislike" Pervasive, but there are other forces that speak warmly of Pervasive, so what should we go for?

If anyone can comment anything on this I would be thankful.
rgds

 

[mirtheil]

I like Pervasive and think there is a future for it. As far as comparing it to MSSQL, check out the white paper on Pervasive's site (

http://www.pervasive.com/support/whitepapers.asp)

called "Aberdeen Cost-of-Ownership Database Study Proves Pervasive.SQL Still The Clear Leader" that talks about the differences between Pervasive, MS SQL, and even Oracle.
One thing to remember about MSSQL is that it only offers one way to the data -- relational(SQL). Pervasive offers two ways to the data -- relational and transactional. For data entry and record retrieval, nothing beats it. You bypass all of the SQL overhead and go straight to the engine.

info@mirtheil.com
Custom VB and Btrieve development.
Certified Pervasive Developer
Certified Pervasive Technician

 

[Patten]

I think Pervasive offers a completely another approach to databases than MSSQL. Pervasive is much cheaper, it is more for embedded database solutions where you don't want to use a DBA (like for software packages, where end users don't want to bother about database administration).
Besides this, Pervasive offers a transactional way of connecting to your data, which offers possibilities if you have to migrate old cobol applications to use databases instead of cobol data files: this without hardly changing anything to your code: MSSQL does not offer this possibility!

 

[TomKane]

You might take a look at this thread from a while ago:

thread318-409684

 

[donresnick]

We have used, first Btrieve, and now Pervasive.SQL for 20 years. The application interface for transactional programming is great -- much better than using SQL programming when it comes to data entry and retrieval of single records, or browsing through a database.

However, if you want SPEED on querying large databases with complex queries, Pervasive.SQL is a very poor fourth to Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL. In fact, we in our company believe that the lastest version of the relational engine (8.5) is slower than the previous (8.0).

Even MySQL can be more than 50 times faster on complex JOINs with very large databases (we've benchmarked this: showing complex queries on a 6 million-record database that take about 40 seconds in P.SQL, take less than 1 second in MySQL).