Tough question from a potential user.

We're a small startup company with several projects at the brink of deployment. When I say deployment, I'm talking potentially thousands/100 thousands of users with lots of concurrent connections to the database. Currently we use Oracle, but for the level we need we're talking *obscene* amounts of money to deploy.

Management seems OK with proceeding with Oracle anyway, despite the huge price hit. A minority of the decision makers are considering MS SQL 7.0. Personally, I think Oracle is a waste of money and the SQL is distasteful, has poor cross-platform support, and has stability issues. My research indicates that PostgreSQL is the *only* viable alternative considering all other commercial DBs are also overpriced or also-rans, and no other 'non-commerial' DBs provide the Oracle-like features we require.

The good news is that we have a great development team, and can hire more people (DBAs) to help out. This is good since I anticipate a lot of custom programming required to use Postgre:
1) We need a custom, *native* connection to Postgre from Delphi with or without the BDE - is this possible?
2) We need a pipe to integrate into MicroStrategies
3) We need an interface to Cold Fusion
4) We need an interface to Mapinfo

Note that I mean native, not ODBC, interfaces.

Less crucial, but still important:
1) We need Erwin - like tools to manipulate the DB
2) How scalable is Prostgre?
3) How about parallel processing/data streaming/clustering?
4) What are the hardware requirements?

Any information related to *any* of these questions would be greatly appreciated. We're against a wall here, and I am the lone voice/proponent is this conflict. Feel free to email me directly, if you wish.

Thanks in advance,
____--James
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James Maxwell
Project Integrator
T e l e g r a p h . n e t
www.telegraph.net
maxwell(at)telegraph(dot)net
561.832.6905
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win. - Gandhi