Re: Democracy and organisation : let's make a

On Tue, 2002-06-25 at 22:48, Josh Berkus wrote:
> 
> Bruce,
> 
> > I think Oracle is our main competitor.  We seem to get more people
> > porting from Oracle than any other database, and our feature set matches
> > there's most closely.
> 
> I disagree, and did as well when you were with Great Bridge.   No matter how 
> Postgres core functionality compares with Oracle, they have nearly a decade 
> of building tools, accessories, and extra whiz-bang features for their 
> product.

My (perhaps a little outdated) experience has been that with Oracle
almost anything on the client side sucks bad.

What they have is a solid database and good upward path to really big
iron.

> Not to mention a serious reputation as the "ultimate database if 
> you can afford it."   

On PC server class computers we seem to be able to match them with one
exception - prepared statements with good(?) binary fe/be protocol ?
> As long as we target Oracle as our "competition", we will remain "the database 
> to use if you can't afford Oracle, but to be replaced with Oracle as soon as 
> you can."  Heck, look at DB2, which is toe-to-toe with Oracle for feature 
> set, but is only really sold to companies who use IBM's other tools.  We're 
> not in a position to challenge that reputation.

But if we are seen as challenging it, it is a good marketing point when
selling to MS SQL folks :)

> On the other hand, we already outstrip MS SQL Server's feature set, as well as 
> being more reliable, lower-maintainence, multi-platform, and cheaper.   

If only someone were to write Transact SQL lookalike and even better -
if we had pluggable frontend protocols - FreeTDS compatibility on server
side would be a big step even without native Win32.

> Frankly, the only thing that MS SQL has over us is easy-but-unreliable GUI 
> admin tools (backup, user, and database management).

We almost have it in pgAdmin and Tora.

---------------
Hannu