Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1083705347.538046_at_yasure>...
>
> Care to disagree? Fine. Provide the names of 5 major commercial
> installations of PostgreSQL.

Here's a newsflash for alot of DBA's. Most applications _do not_ need a database as powerfull as Oracle. Like it or not I would bet a few apps could get by with flat files. (I'm half joking...)

I've been a DBA for about 8 years and its rare for a company to use the advanced features of Oracle. Advanced Queueing, Replication (in all its forms), RAC, flashback query, VPD, etc. etc. In all honesty how often are these features used? I worked in a dev. shop once where they were prepared to spend 6 months developing a feature that could easily be handled by Oracle. Their reasoning was that they didn't want to get tied into a particular database.

Now, i'm not a big fan of mysql... The gotchas link someone else posted in this thread says it all but I think postgresql is a good for small-mid sized apps. It has alot of features that mysql is missing. Now, would I use it for my production financials system? Ummm no, but I would use it for the corporate employee timesheet system. For critical applications I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Oracle, in some cases maybe even SQLServer but there is room for opensource databases. Received on Fri May 07 2004 - 09:08:47 CDT