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Look at Great Bridge's website and you will find that 24x7 support is available, for a price. Great Bridge also employs at least one of the developers of the PostgreSQL database. I don't know about any of the MySQL options but you can have it with PostgreSQL.

Actually, Greatbridge DOES sell PostgreSQL:
http://www.greatbridge.com/product/software.php
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• Using sequence objects to generate serial IDs are more flexible than auto increment columns IMHO. This is how Oracle actually did it the last time I worked with Oracle
• Version 7.1 of Postgresql , which came out last week supports unlimited row lengths for blobs without resorting to large objects
• The documentation is fine. Check the online stuff at the website, or buy manuals from Great Bridge or just search Amazon.com on the term postgresql for commercial stuff

BTW, Postgresql follows ANSI SQL far more closely than MySQL attempts to , so almost any standard reference book should help you along with the query side. You don't have to use the source

When PostgreSQL in a fault tolerant cluster starts to become more mainstream, I'm going to start looking at moving that direction.

Well, I don't know about mySQL, but GreatBridge provides 24x7x365 support for PostgreSQL, which is also open source and said to be more scalable than mySQL.

Thank you for proudly waving the GNUflag in our faces. Pity we're not talking about PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL isn't a GNU product. It's distributed under the UC Berkeley license instead. Besides, this thread started on the topic of how worthless MySQL is for complex databases, so someone had to pipe in with alternatives.

btw, if Oracle released a report stating that they had benchmarks proving that their DB was the best at everything, but you couldn't actually see those benchmarks, would you give the claim any credence? If not, why should we trust someone else's rumor? Just because it says good things about an OS application?

Both Oracle and Microsoft prohibit vendors from publishing benchmarks using their names without their prior approval. The original source does, however, show the benchmarks with Oracle and Microsoft's offerings marked as Proprietary 1 and Proprietary 2. However, on the section of how the benchmark was done, they list among other things, the version of the software the used, with "Proprietary 1" being at version 8.1.5 (probably Oracle), and "Proprietary 2" being at version 7.0 (probably Microsoft SQL Server). The amount of 'tuning' they did for PostgreSQL is quite a bit more than they did for any of the other vendors, so it's entirely possible they might've had slightly higher performance (especially on the TPC-C benchmark, where PostgreSQL, Proprietary 1 and 2 were neck and neck with the three products still tying at 100 users. The test probably would've been more interesting with 200 or 300 users, since they probably would've started to deviate a little).

Just about the only real features that are missing from PostgreSQL that it's competitors have is replication and full text indexing.

Thank you for proudly waving the GNUflag in our faces. Pity we're not talking about PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL isn't a GNU product. It's distributed under the UC Berkeley license instead. Besides, this thread started on the topic of how worthless MySQL is for complex databases, so someone had to pipe in with alternatives.

btw, if Oracle released a report stating that they had benchmarks proving that their DB was the best at everything, but you couldn't actually see those benchmarks, would you give the claim any credence? If not, why should we trust someone else's rumor? Just because it says good things about an OS application?

Both Oracle and Microsoft prohibit vendors from publishing benchmarks using their names without their prior approval. The original source does, however, show the benchmarks with Oracle and Microsoft's offerings marked as Proprietary 1 and Proprietary 2. However, on the section of how the benchmark was done, they list among other things, the version of the software the used, with "Proprietary 1" being at version 8.1.5 (probably Oracle), and "Proprietary 2" being at version 7.0 (probably Microsoft SQL Server). The amount of 'tuning' they did for PostgreSQL is quite a bit more than they did for any of the other vendors, so it's entirely possible they might've had slightly higher performance (especially on the TPC-C benchmark, where PostgreSQL, Proprietary 1 and 2 were neck and neck with the three products still tying at 100 users. The test probably would've been more interesting with 200 or 300 users, since they probably would've started to deviate a little).

Just about the only real features that are missing from PostgreSQL that it's competitors have is replication and full text indexing.

Great Bridge just released a Press Release (pun not intended) here (http://www.greatbridge.com/news/p_081620001.html) regarding the software, tuning, etc. used in the benchmark.

... can be found here: http://www.greatbridge.com/news/p_081420001.html

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There was a comment on the article at the bottom that gives a link to the original story, which has some pictures, you can find it Here

1. All tests used ODBC.
2. Neither MySQL nor Interbase 6.0 were tested in TPC-C. MySQL doesn't have enough SQL92 conformance. Interbase 6.0's ODBC driver isn't ready yet. They tried to use Interbase 5.0 but couldn't get it to work.
3. The test where all databases competed is the AS3AP test. A little more research shows that this is a test with mixed updates and retrievals. MySQL 3.22 is known to have poor performance with a large number of mixed updates and retrievals. This may explain why the MySQL line peaked and then fell off for this test.

This 'article' is nothing more than a press release from Great Bridge.

There may be some additional information learned by reading the results of the benchmark from
http://www.tpc.org/New_Result/TPCC_ Results.html

Although I am having a hard time finding any reference to Postgres on that page. Can anyone find any better references?

-k

Someday I hope the open source world will progress to the point where it will stop getting excited every time some corporation tosses a failing product over the wall.

Incidentally, from eavesdropping on the postgresql developer list, I gather that their take on interbase is that postgresql will be as good or better by around 7.1 or 7.2 (the current release is 7.0). I believe the only key feature postgresql is missing at the moment is outer joins.

(Warning, blatant religious evangelism follows.) Postgresql is BSD liscensed, and has a really good team of open source developers actively working on it, including Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian... (unlike Inprise, which is now in the position of trying to drum up community support using an MPL-style license).

Postgresql has been making rapid improvements over the last year or so (though it still has the worst name of any software project, ever...). Bruce Momjian has a book coming out about postgresql and the full text is available online. Commercial support for postgresql is available from places such as Great Bridge.

(And whatever you do, don't mention Perl in this thread, or you'll have the Python fanatics in here too.)

Great Bridge is to PostgreSQL as Red Hat is to Linux. They will offer support contracts and also fund (some?) future development of PostgreSQL.

This move on weather.com's part is not incredibly surprising (although auspicious for open source/free software's continued growth) as the parent company of weather.com is Landmark Communications, which has relatively deep connections to the open source community. The chairman of Landmark Communications, Frank Batten Jr., was personally an early angel investor in Red Hat, and now his company has funded ($25 million) a subsidiary, Great Bridge LLC to provide commercial support for the advanced BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. The press releases detailing the connection between these companies can be found here.

This move on weather.com's part is not incredibly surprising (although auspicious for open source/free software's continued growth) as the parent company of weather.com is Landmark Communications, which has relatively deep connections to the open source community. The chairman of Landmark Communications, Frank Batten Jr., was personally an early angel investor in Red Hat, and now his company has funded ($25 million) a subsidiary, Great Bridge LLC to provide commercial support for the advanced BSD-licensed PostgreSQL. The press releases detailing the connection between these companies can be found here.