Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

From: Jerry Gitomer <jgitomer_at_erols.com>
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 00:52:11 -0400
Message-Id: <pan.2004.05.20.04.51.56.871727@erols.com>

On Wed, 19 May 2004 10:03:34 -0700, Quirk wrote:

> "Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message
> news:<40ab3835$0$8990$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au>...
>

>> Quirk wrote:
>> 
>> [snip to cut to the chase]
>> 
>> Personally, I think my software assurance comes from Oracle's size and
>> market share (and my support contract), and I don't need potentially
>> crippling abstractions to protect me against their failure at some
>> indeterminate and perhaps never-to-arrive point in the future.

>
> And the choice is personal, so you are welcome to yours, however, you
> can imagine that not all applications, especialy commercial ones, can
> afford to tie themselves to one exclusive database, and many other
> applications may not want to force there users into using one exclusive
> database.
>
>

>> [snip to cut to the chase]
>>
Commercial applications often must tie themselves to one exclusive database. For example, the last inhouse database application I worked on was a medium sized one -- 50 (wo)man years of developer time. Management decided to use a three tier model, but then had us push all of the functionality possible down to database access using Oracle's PL/SQL.

The decision was based on the need for performance and scalability in dealing with several tables with over 10 million rows each in a web based system expected to handle several thousand requests per hour.

Processing demands frequently dictate that commercial applications be tightly coupled to a commercial vendor's proprietary tools and processing languages. To do otherwise would produce a system that could not be guaranteed to meet performance requirements.

I like MySQL (and I prefer PostgreSQL to MySQL), but when it comes to creating an application that absolutely, positively must provide high performance on a 24/7 basis I would opt to use Oracle or IBM's DB2 because I know that either can provide me with whatever support I require (all it takes is money), their products perform well, and their products are so scalable that using either I can develop on a lap top running under windows and move my code -- with no changes -- to a multi-mainframe monster with as many disk drives as the customer can afford. Received on Wed May 19 2004 - 23:52:11 CDT