Re: Postgres vr.s Oracle

On Wed, 10 Dec 2008, Chris Browne wrote:

> And vis-a-vis the comments about it possibly being not-permissible to
> release numbers, it's quite possible that 8i is old enough that when
> the guy bought his licenses, there wasn't such a clause in the
> purchase contract.

Doubt it.  8i shipped in March of 1999.  July 30, 1999 was when the
infamous "See The Test That Wasn't" article in PC Magazine talked about
how Oracle wouldn't allow them to publish the benchmarks they'd done.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/01/24/000124opfoster.html
talks about it (that's where I remember it from, who reads PC Mag?), the
commentary there says "Because Oracle's license is not a shrinkwrap per se
but an actual signed contract, PC Magazine didn't have a way to challenge
the non-disclosure term".

While I was poking around looking that up again, I actually found a couple
of places what look like legit Oracle contracts are posted at; glancing at
these two:

http://contracts.onecle.com/bearingpoint/oracle.collab.1995.11.22.shtml
http://www.techagreements.com/agreement-preview.aspx?num=23093

Suggests that it's very unlikely the publication of results was within the
realm of any contract with them.

Mike's earlier blog posting has some choice comments in it too:
http://www.miketec.org/serendipity/index.php?/archives/5-Oracle-prices-themselves-out.html
"I have one app running on Oracle and three that run on a Postgres
database. They run on similar hardware, yet the Oracle server is the one
that gives me the performance problems. Postgres gets hammered all day
long by the user's poorly written reports and handles it just fine."

I get the feeling he's not real concerned about if Oracle gets mad at him.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD