Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

Dmytri Kleiner (quirk_at_syntac.net) writes:
> The Application that you wrote I have no reason to doubt is of
> sufficient quality to keep your customers satisfied.
>
> Unfortunately you have created unneeded dependencies for them, the
> worst of which is not MS SQL, since it is fairly easy to get at data
> in MS SQL and archive it or export it in a usefull way, the worst is
> that you have tied your customers to a terrible Operating System with
> a terrible licence, even Oracle users are not so screwed since at the
> very least they have a choice when it comes to OS.

The fact that you may found Windows a terrible operation system is of course completely irrelvant to the discussion.

If it wasn't clear: we offer our customers a product, and they are not only tied to the DBMS and operating system, they are just as well tied to our product. They can still change a competing system, and this has happened, for instance in conjunctions with mergers. (In which case it is more an issue of politicis and which company that buys which that determines which system they go for, than the technical qualities of the respective systems.) Converting data from one system to another is of course a major task.

As for the platform, the customers knows what they get when they buy our system. If they don't accept Windows, they are not likely to go for us either.  

> I would say you made it quite clear that your basic message was that
> it would be folly to do what I was suggesting,

Yes, it would be a folly to do so out of principle always. Sometimes it may be necessary, sometimes you are better off tying yourself to one single platform.

> It is not, as I've said, it can be as simple as writing a wrapper
> function around your data access.

Yes, if you build your system with all logic in a middle layer. Which often can result in serious performance problems, because a lot of data has to travel forth and back over the network. We have a lot of the business logic in stored procedures, and we have also found that this works best.  

> Not as expensive as having the system itself obsoleted by an obsoleted
> dependency or the inabilty to get support for a dependency due to a
> licencing dispute.

Well, my company has worked this system since 1992, and nothing close to that has happened yet.

-- 
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, sommar_at_algonet.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
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