Re: What do you think?

Terry Jarrard wrote:

> Hello everyone.
> I've tried to do alot of research on PostgreSQL.  And first off, it looks nice.
> I've looked through all the FAQ's I can find, ditto on the archives, and
> I've got a couple of question for you.
>
> I am really interested in peoples personal opinions.  you can email me
> directly at jarrard@webzone.net or AE-Kamylon@aephirsden.com
> The more replies, the better we will feel with going this route.
>
> 1.  In an overall basis how do you like PostgreSQL?

I have been doing a little work with postgreSQL and Tcl/Tk, and I find this a good

development environment (using libpgtcl). You will need to do some development
on the way you want to make forms.

>
>
> 2.  I am an ORACLE developer.  And I've been looking into PostgreSQL as an
> alternitive to ORACLE for a company I'm working for.  The DBA we have have
> has been an ORACLE DBA for a while.  So the question is, how much of a
> difference will this be to us?

I've been using Oracle for the last year in a Forms environment on WinNT and in a
Cobol environment on HP/UX.
You will probably miss a whole lot of administrative commands. There is an
interactive shell,
but it is nothing like Sql*Plus The last four year I have been working in an
administrative/banking
environment, so what I REALLY, REALLY find lacking is the support of a FIXED
numeric of the kind you
have in Oracle, Cobol, PL/SQL : NUMERIC(width, precision). You are probably an
American, but I
wouldn't recommend using postgreSQL here in Europe, where you need a precision
from 0 to 10
digits in financial calculations. Also, there is a precompiler, but only for C,
while Oracle supports
Ada, C, Cobol, Fortran...
What will you have, on the other hand ? A substantially larger budget probably,
due to no license
fee ;-). There is pgPL/SQL, which is pretty close to PL/SQL for stored procedures
and triggers.
Applications can be written in Perl, Tcl/Tk, Python, C, C++, and there are ODBC
and JDBC drivers.

Generally, (apart from the lack of a good NUMERIC datatype), I think they can
stand next to each
other, and the price can't be beat.

Jurgen Defurne
defurnj@glo.be