Re: troll

> Oracle will always have more R & D funding at their disposal, and will
> be capable to have postgresql stay where it is now: in the toy
> department.

And there's no way that a free web server like Apache or a free browser like Firefox will ever compete against Microsoft's R&D. Or free languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby will ever compete against Sun's R&D. Unfortunately, the mythical man month prevents you from getting a linear productivity improvement from a linear increase in staff. So, Oracle might have a thousand people doing R&D - but probably only a dozen can work productively on the engine. What are the rest doing? Building XML extenders? Integrating purchased ETL software? Integrating java? Big deal.

Face it - in spite of a wide collection of defects and limitations, mysql is picking a ton of steam. The fact that it easily corrupts data (allows invalid dates, truncates strings & numbers without warnings), has terrible performance for most application, etc - none of this matters. Many people don't know, don't care, and just buy it. And Oracle has lost their revenue. To a *toy* database. Even worse for Oracle - Mysql won't be a toy forever and postgresql isn't a toy now.

Postgresql right now is sufficiently mature for use in fortune 100s. However, since it can't handle the most demanding tasks, these companies typically require multiple products - like Postgresql plus DB2/Oracle/Informix/Sybase/etc. And since the cost of maintaining two separate skillsets generally exceeds the licensing savings, it's usually (in my opinion) worth it for large companies to forego the occasional license savings and stick to a consistent commercial product line. Today.

But small companies, with small data requirements? They're generally fine on postgresql right now..

And with every passing year - between Moore's Law, and the rapid evolution of these products we're going to see them absorb the smallest databases - until the only databases still using large commercial products will be the rare monsters.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons that Oracle desperately needs to become an applications company. Received on Fri Jul 29 2005 - 13:18:45 CDT