Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

Sarah Tanembaum wrote:

> Beside its an opensource and supported by community, what's the fundamental
> differences between PostgreSQL and those high-price commercial database (and
> some are bloated such as Oracle) from software giant such as Microsoft SQL
> Server, Oracle, and Sybase?
>
> Is PostgreSQL reliable enough to be used for high-end commercial
> application? Thanks
>
>

_Short Summary_

   *PostgreSQL*
Free, loaded with features, not particularly fast, some extras

   *MySQL*
Free, not so loaded with features, very fast, some extras

   *SQL Server*
/Definetly/ not free, jam packed with features, very fast, lots of extras

   *Sybase and Oracle*
Can't say, I have no experience with them.

_Answer to your question_
Suitable for a high-end commercial application? I'm not sure I would risk my job on it...

We use SQL Server where I work and we well, beat the shit out of the server. The hardware is backed with F.C. NAS from Network Appliance. The actual hardware is a Dell 4-way (excluding Hyper Threading) with ~8GB of RAM and considering what a beating the box has to endure it does really well until one of the developers starts joining half a million records off of a table with insufficient indexes. But I digress...

Personally, I wouldn't use it for commercial apps. The commercial solutions have something very useful, commercial backing. This gives them the opportunity to work on the server itself, extra features, extras like management interfaces and clustering software.

IMHO current open source RDBMS do not have the robustness, stability, or performance to use in mission-critical situations.

_A Message to Open Source Bible Beaters_ I'm one of you too, but I also work in a company where we make thousands of dollars per minute. Downtime is /not/ an option and frankly, open source databases are not quite there yet. I forsee things seriously shifting in the next decade or so. Received on Fri May 14 2004 - 00:23:19 CDT