Re: [GENERAL] Postgres vs commercial products

At 23:36 +0300 on 21/7/98, Steve Doliov wrote:


> in commercial enterprises such as Oracle, INnformix and Sybase, whether to
> implement a feature or part of a standard gets boiled down to a business
> decision/question -- will adding this or that create more profit for the
> company?  if the answer is no, the feature or standard spec dies.
>
> at postgres the story is different.  the question is, will the feature be
> useful?  if the answer is yes, unless it is beyond the scope of the
> developers, it will get implemented.

Not that I want to offend the Postgres developers, who are doing a great
job. But in the same way that commercial enterprises think in terms of
profit, volunteer workers think of it like this: Does it interest me to
implement this feature? Do I have the time? Do I have the expertise?

Commercial companies will make the time if there is profit. They will also
train their workers if they don't have the expertise. And wheather or not
the workers enjoy what they are doing is not an issue...

Commercial enterprises *are* customer-focused. If they can offer a feature
which will make a customer prefer them over the competition, they will
implement it. There is a strong correlation between profit and client
satisfaction - at least, in a competitive market (which, unlike the OS
market, IS true for databases).

Here in the university, my bosses seriously consider moving to a commercial
product - either Oracle or Informix. There will be two reasons for it:

* Compatibility with software. Most RADs and server-side whatever work
  with one of the mentioned commercial products. Some work with ODBC,
  but I think that at this moment, nobody actually tried them with
  the PostgreSQL ODBC driver.

* Replication server etc. - very important for our sysadmin. Even a
  reliable backup facility. I've seen too many complaints on the lists,
  plus saw an actual glitch myself, to trust in pg_dump. Moreover, I
  have to invest extra time in making pg_dump into a solution with
  scheduled backups and alerts for tape changes and whatnot...

* Features.

The only real advantage Postgres has at the moment is its price...

One last comment: We are based on Solaris/sparc. So as far as I'm
concerned, commercial products are already here. Their intended invasion
into the linux market will make the situation exactly similar to mine.

Herouth

--
Herouth Maoz, Internet developer.
Open University of Israel - Telem project
http://telem.openu.ac.il/~herutma