From: shoad316@... (Dave)
Date: 2004-05-07T23:08:57+09:00
Subject: Re: What so special about PostgreSQL and other RDBMS?

Daniel Morgan <damorgan@x.washington.edu> wrote in message news:<1083705347.538046@yasure>...
> 
> Care to disagree? Fine. Provide the names of 5 major commercial
> installations of PostgreSQL.

Here's a newsflash for alot of DBA's.   Most applications _do not_
need a database as powerfull as Oracle.   Like it or not I would bet a
few apps could get by with flat files.  (I'm half joking...)

I've been a DBA for about 8 years and its rare for a company to use
the advanced features of Oracle.  Advanced Queueing, Replication (in
all its forms), RAC, flashback query, VPD, etc. etc.   In all honesty
how often are these features used?   I worked in a dev. shop once
where they were prepared to spend 6 months developing a feature that
could easily be handled by Oracle.  Their reasoning was that they
didn't want to get tied into a particular database.

Now, i'm not a big fan of mysql... The gotchas link someone else
posted in this thread says it all but I think postgresql is a good for
small-mid sized apps.  It has alot of features that mysql is missing. 
Now, would I use it for my production financials system?  Ummm no, but
I would use it for the corporate employee timesheet system.   For
critical applications I wouldn't hesitate to recommend Oracle, in some
cases maybe even SQLServer but there is room for opensource databases.