On 06/24/2011 09:14 AM, Rodrigo E. De León Plicet wrote:
Here: http://cglendenningoracle.blogspot.com/2011/06/oracle-vs-postgres-postgresql.html Any comments?
He's been working with Oracle too long, and forgotten that it's a database not a career and a lifestyle?
More seriously: it's all about thinking habits and values, to the point where there's almost no point arguing. The author has a completely different view of business, risk management, product evaluation, etc.
Most notably in terms of worldview, there's the strong assumption that you need a single owning organization to get support, and that the organization will actually provide acceptable support at all let alone at a reasonable price. Now, my own experience is hardly comprehensive, but I've usually had much *better* support from 3rd parties than from a vendor, particularly in areas where the vendor tries to lock you in to their own support arrangements. Almost like they don't really try if they can lock out the competition...
When you're talking with someone that invested in an organization and a viewpoint, you're unlikely to get them to examine alternative possibilities.
It's interesting that the author fails to cover perhaps the most important point about product selection: You should select your database based on your needs, not your ideology. You should determine your needs, then evaluate available options according to those needs. You might select even a different database for different things if your needs for those two things differ enough. For example, I prefer working with PostgreSQL, but it wouldn't be the database I'd choose if I needed a super-fast mostly in-memory sharded system for XML/JSON document storage because that's not where its strengths lie.
I'm quite surprised the article didn't mention the importance of having "somebody to sue if it goes wrong", which is a comment I often see made re Oracle. It's lucky they didn't try to stress that point, because evidence of succesful suits by customers against Oracle are ... hard to come by ... and Oracle's army of lawyers makes it unlikely that suits would succeed. Despite that and the fact that a suit is unlikely to award damages sufficient to make up for your losses unless you can show negligence or willful misbehavior, people keep on talking about needing to have somebody to sue.
-- Craig Ringer -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
