Re: Open Source Database article

On Tuesday 17 September 2002 01:22 am, Christoph Dalitz wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Sep 2002 03:53:50 -0400
>
> pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org wrote:
> > Here is a nice article comparing open-source and commercial databases:
> >
> >     http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/09/14/1253246&tid=11
>
> Although I am myself very fond of PosgreSQL, I am not sure whether
> the superficial advocacy in this article is really helpful.
>
> I would rather prefer honest comments both on the strengths and flaws
> of PostgreSQL. Eg. PostgreSQl is particularly weak on security aspects
> (every user has CreateTable rights, no schema support, no role privileges),
> which make it inadequate for some production environments.
> This is a point that I have never seen mentioned in any review article.
> Maybe I am the only one who bothers...
>

I agree. Postgres pretty much leaves all that up to the clients. I get the
impression that most environments don't involve a large number of database
users accessing one DB. Otherwise that would come up more often, I would
think.

Schema support, BTW, is alive and well (from what I can tell) in 7.3b1.

That, by the way, bings up an interesting point. What versions of software
should people use to compare? Postgres will have all the features of 7.3 in a
short while. So many of the features are working so well... should they be
denied the coverage in an article? Then again, it's also not fair to compare
the working features of one database with the almost-working features of
another. Of course that brings up the whole concept of who's declaring the
feature to be working (presumably the developers of the project), and their
motivations.

Well, it's certainly not easy to be fair, I suppose.

Regards,
    Jeff