From: kenfar42@... (Ken) Date: 2004-05-06T04:18:57+09:00 Subject: Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS? "Sarah Tanembaum" wrote in message news:... > Beside its an opensource and supported by community, what's the fundamental > differences between PostgreSQL and those high-price commercial database (and > some are bloated such as Oracle) from software giant such as Microsoft SQL > Server, Oracle, and Sybase? > > Is PostgreSQL reliable enough to be used for high-end commercial > application? Thanks Depends. How much is your data worth? How much will downtime cost? How much will a commercial database cost? PostgreSQL is a really nice little database, and has a lot going for it: - easy to install, admin, and use - easy to port databases between PostgreSQL and other commercial databases - very high-quality implementation However, on the other side of the coin: - missing many of the high-end features needed in large data volumes like partitioning, clustering, parallelism, materialized views, query rewrite, etc. - missing many of the high-availabity features - missing lots of the various stuff: replication, etc Personally, when I've got a lot of value in my database I typically opt for a commercial offering. But there are those exceptional situations - like: - no budget - just want to prototype - it's read-only data and you can create a dozen small databases - the data isn't super-valuable Then in these cases - PostgreSQL is a nice little product, and I wouldn't hesitate to use it. Much better, btw than its primary competitor - MySQL with its limited, non-ansi sql, and amazing exception handling irregularities. kenfar