Re: Interesting info about Oracle

(Please don't cross-post - the same people tend to read all 3 groups so it's
unnecessary.)

Yes, Oracle can be considered expensive. There are a number of reasons for this including
- having one of the largest dedicated development groups of any software organzation.
- people not understanding how to organize app s/w vs database s/w - people using the least common denominator after purchasing a rich functionality rdbms
(and many, many more reasons)

There is nothing wrong with PostGreSQL and I suspect it will become a serious competitor to Oracle in the foreseeable future, specifically in the 'commodity database' arena.

(Based on the tone and words of your post, my feeling is that PostGreSQL is
actually considerably more mature than you are.)

There are many areas that Oracle provides a solution inside the database environment that commodity databases do not address. I realize that you may not need, care about or want these. However I have seen a lot of organizations get a commodity database (or restrict themselves to the commodity capabilities of Oracle) and build - at extremely high cost in both development and maintenance - such things as: workflow, message queueing, text search, location storage and manipulation, video/graphic/audio storage/retrieval, and so on. In addition, there are a lot of orgs that are stil using CGI and the like to get at the database. I have also seen other organizations leverage these capabilities and save the cost of the licenses several times over by not reinventing the wheel.

The saddest thing for me is watching the new crop of Java (J2EE) developers excitedly working 'new' functionality that has been stable in the database industry for years, in many cases because they have not bothered to learn the technology or terminolgy.

My conclusion is very simple - if you are willing to leverage what the product can provide (and that means learning it as well), and are willing to admit that the cost of a software solution includes the initial price AND the support/maintenance/education/development/upgrades over a longer period, you can find that Oracle is actually less expensive than the competitors. When you add the current edge in reliability and scalability, it might even be less expensive than PostgresQL

However, if you are not willing to leverage the total capability and if the reliability & scalability 'edge' it *can* provide are not as important, then alternates might be feasible.

 I'm not sure why you posted the article other than to invoke a flame war. I do note there is a lot of one-sided discussion in the article, basically true blue "I just call's 'em as I see's 'em - won't mention I'm blind in one eye and wearing sunglasses to boot" reporting from what I can tell.

You sound like your mind is made up in any case. You can dance with your devil, I'll dance with mine. Received on Sat Jun 21 2003 - 00:44:11 CDT