Re: Database market share 2004

"Robert Klemme" <bob.news_at_gmx.net> wrote:

>> I'm not saying that that's a good thing (in fact I'm appalled), but
>> the fact of the matter is that many companies pay for expensive db's
>> when in fact they are little more than bitbuckets.

>But presumably large bit buckets.

Indeed.

> I'm not very up to date on PostGres

http://www.postgresql.org/about/advantages

> and mysql features,

MySQL features can be got from their site. They only recently introducted DRI, triggers, SP's and a whole raft of other stuff which take it out of the "toy" db, good only for serving 100 web pages a day. I'd wait a while to see if the truckload of new features that they've introduced work properly.

> but do OSS DB's support all these management operations
>that can be done in parallel to production operation? In Oracle you can
>create partitions on the fly without interrupting operations etc.

OSS db's trail behind the likes of Oracle obviously, but how many people actually require hot repartitioning? I don't think PGSQL supports this (they introduced tablespaces in version 8), so maybe they trail in terms of functionality.

They are ambitious and have lots of plans

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.TODO.html

I have on occasion gone into work on a Saturday/Sunday to perform large scale operations on db's other than Oracle which couldn't be done hot. I got double pay and a day in lieu - I agree that it's better if the db can do it on the fly, but it's an issue which can be worked around. What did Oracle practitioners do before this became possible?

>> I think that it's
>> only a matter of time before the IT industry is going to wake up to
>> the reality that (at least as far as *_I_* have seen) very little of
>> the capacity of an Oracle or DB2 is actually being used and make the
>> switch to cheaper or Open Source db's.

>If they deliver the same robustness - it's not only about functionality
>features.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/applications/0,39020384,39173013,00.htm

suggests robustness to me. Firebird is also very solid, having 20 years of commercial development behind it.

Paul...

> robert

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