Re: why postgresql over other RDBMS

On 5/24/07, Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> wrote:
> Tom Allison wrote:
> > You've addressed cost and performance.
> > Not much left.
> >
> > Try it out for yourself and see if it works for you.
>
> + elephant in logo
> - unpronounceable name
> + excellent mailing lists
> + excellent developer community
> - you can download as many copies as you like and a salesman still won't
> take you out to lunch

+ Friendly toolset in the box. [1]
+ Transactional DDL. [2]
+ Table inheritance, if you care to use unportable features.
+ Extensibility. [3]
+ PostGIS for spatial extensions.
- Replication offerings suck.
- Warm standby involve a lot of manual labour.
- Point-in-time recovery involve a lot of manual labour.

[1] psql+readline, pg_dump etc. are a breeze compared to crusty Oracle
tools; psql feels distinctly modern compared to MySQL's crummy
interpreter.

[2] Nobody else has this, I believe, except possibly Ingres and
NonStop SQL. This means you can do a "begin transaction", then issue
"create table", "alter table", etc. ad nauseum, and in the mean time
concurrent transactions will just work. Beautiful for atomically
upgrading a production server. Oracle, of course, commits after each
DDL statements.

[3] PostgreSQL can be extended with new domain types, stored-procedure
languages (eg., PL/Python, PL/Perl), functions (eg., dblink,
fuzzystrmatch, cube), and indexes (GiST, GIN). Together this allows
projects such as TSearch2 and PostGIS to be implemented as separate
extensions to PostgreSQL.

Alexander.