Sun Eyes PostgreSQL

Da Massive writes "Sun is looking seriously into the database market - namely PostgreSQL. It says Oracle and IBM and even Microsoft licensing fees are way too expensive for the average punter. This from John Loiacono, executive vice president of software: "We're not going to OEM Microsoft but we are looking at PostgreSQL right now," he said, adding that over time the database will become integrated into the operating system."

Comments

Re:Predictable

[hey!]

PostGreSQL has none of these issues, and can hold its own in a comparison with Oracle or SQL Server.

Depends, you can't exactly put a product like a RDBMS on a single scale. But in general it makes some sense to compare Postgres to SQL Server, but very little sense to compare either of those products with Oracle; although the limited attention span of most "decision makers" means that in practice the marketing departments of MS and Oracle play that game.

Oracle really really wants people to use Oracle for everything, and in truth you can use it for a lot of day to day database tasks, in the way you could use an eighteen wheeler to take your kids to soccer practice. Oracle's not very standards compatible. There's a million ways it traps you into their product. There's endless ways to shoot yourself in the foot, and getting things back requires a kind of black sorcery. In short, Oracle really sucks, unless it's the only tool that can do the job; in which case it's wonderful. Oracle's built so you can perform heart surgery on the patient while he's running a marathon, for the kind of applications where serious money is lost every time the database hiccups; the kind of applications where you have a team of DBAs who are paid six figures and it's a bargain.

SQL Server, to my mind, is mediocre. It's the choice of the departments who believe thing are easier if everthing comes from one vendor, and it's good enough to keep them out of too much trouble much of the time. From a DBA's standpoint I'd guess it's very easy to administer up to the point it becomes useless; if you never get there, you're happy. From a app develper's standpoint, it's pretty dreadful, but these days the style is to put as much as you can in the app tier so that doesn't matter much as it used to.

Don't know much about Postgres in production environemnts. It seems clean and I like the fact you have a choice of stored procedure languages.