Re: open source PostgreSQL not supportable?

> Bruce Lewis wrote:
>> DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> writes:
>>
>>>But lets put a bit of common sense into this discussion. What auditor is
>>>going to risk government intervention in their life by signing off on a
>>>financial statement from which they have no guarantee that the numbers
>>>are real?
>> Every auditor.
>> Every single one.
>> There is never a guarantee that the numbers are real. The best you
>> can
>> do is to document who it is that you're trusting and the procedures they
>> appeared to follow. Is it possible for an auditor to say that a DBA or
>> system admin cannot be a trusted party, and a closed-source database
>> vendor must be trusted instead? Yes, it is possible. Has anyone
>> actually gotten that from an auditor? Not to anyone's knowledge in this
>> discussion, including you.
>> From what everyone here has said, including you, there is no reason
>> to
>> think one cannot comply with Sarbanes-Oxley while using PostgreSQL.
>
> In PostgreSQL you have not one 1/10 the capabilities built into the top
> commercial products. Your statement is wholly without merit. Last time
> I looked SAP, PeopleSoft, eBusiness Suite, Siebel, JD Edwards, Baan,
> etc. ... not one ran on PostgreSQL. And you know there might just be a
> reason.
>
> But I guess you can look on the bright side of things. It is worth
> precisely what you paid for it so you can't feel cheated.

Well, MySQL(tm) hasn't got more than a fraction of the capabilities of PostgreSQL, and one of the major "selling points" of the version 5 release of MySQL was that it had acquired all of the functionality perceived as necessary in order to support SAP R/3.

After all, R/3 was designed to run on all of Adabas-D, Oracle, Informix, and DB2, and had a design based in many ways on R/2, which ran on Adabas and IMS (which isn't *that* distant from being a souped-up Sleepycat DB/DBM).

R/3 doesn't use triggers. R/3 doesn't use foreign keys. R/3 doesn't used stored procedures. Dates are stored as text strings, with *weaker* integrity checking, at the database level than people make fun of MySQL for. It doesn't use any of the sorts of integrity tools that you get so hysterical about these sorts of threads of discussion. Data integrity is maintained inside the application. When Oracle is used, it is used as a Remarkably Dumb unintelligent data store.

Nearly all that they (MySQL AB) forcibly required to add in order to become a plausible platform for R/3 was a transaction engine. There has been plenty of indication that efforts were underway to get R/3 to run on MySQL.

Of course, Oracle quite successfully "trumped" this action by buying InnoDB OY, makers of that transactional engine.

But in any case, for you to bring up SAP as a would-be example in favor of your hysterical opinionating clearly demonstrates that you know nothing about how it works. Historically, it has managed all the sorts of things you probably imagine it uses the database for inside the application server, because the requirement to support numerous DBMSes with enormously varying functionality mandated using them in a "lowest common denominator" fashion where I don't think you have any concept how low the bar of that denominator is.

You would look a lot less dishonest if you made it clearer which statements you make are:

1. Statements made by governments
2. Statements made by regulatory agencies
3. Statements made by auditing firms versus
4. Inferences that you have made up yourself out of whole cloth. -- output = reverse("moc.liamg" "@" "enworbbc") I'M SORRY, LUSER, I CAN'T LET YOU DO THAT. WHY DON'T YOU LIE DOWN AND TAKE A STRESS PILL? MY NAME IS LM1. I WAS MADE AT THE LISP MACHINE FACTORY IN MASSACHUSETTS ON DECEMBER 12, 1992. MY TEACHER WAS MR. WINSTON. HE TAUGHT ME A PROGRAM. WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IT? HERE IT IS: