Re: I found the light away from Oracle RDBMS

On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 12:15:38 -0400, Enlightened and Free wrote:

> I recently stumbled upon the free open source PostgresSQL
> (http://www.postgresql.com).

So did I. There is even a great book by Korry Douglas.

>
> In my opinion, this is one of the most advanced, FREE/open source RBM
> systems I have ever come across.

Much better then MySQL, I'll have to agree. The thing I especially like is the fact that it is using Perl as an internal scripting language, instead of PL/SQL.

> It is practically easy to migrate
> Oracle databases to this since it supports _practically_ everything
> Oracle does. But it is also FREE. No expensive licensing costs. If you
> have one cpu, you pay nothing! If you have 10 cpus, you still pay
> absolutely nothing! What a novel idea!

The problem is that when you need support and a patch ASAP, there is nobody to write it. It's a good thing for non-critical databases, but if you want something really stable and survivable, you're left with commercial product. In addition to that PostgreSQL is missing many availability options like standby databases or RAC. There are five (5) published books about Pg and a gazillion or more published books about Oracle, some of them really great (Jonathan's "Practical Oracle 8i", Cary's "Optimizing Oracle for Performance", Tom Kyte's "Efficient Oracle by Design" and Dan Tow's "Tuning SQL"). I sometimes swear and curse at Oracle for their behavior but I stick to it. At least their WW support is there when I need somebody to yell at. Practically, I've never been given an offer to become a Pg DBA with the equal or larger salary as what I'm getting as an Oracle DBA. That settles it. I love good public domain software but I need to pay the bills. Postgres is still a wooden gun and you have to shout "bang, bang" if you want to scare somebody. Oracle is the real thing.
In addition to that, this seems to be a group about the Oracle RDBMS, at least judging by its name. Your post, therefore, qualifies as spam.

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