New and investigating

there

My name is Alain, i have like 14 years behind me working with Oracle, and
nothing else basically.

Recently i came across PostgreSQL and found it to be a very atractive thing,
in concept at least. I would like to know more about it, but not technically
yet, rather on the side of the capabilities it has from a "managerial" point
of view. I was wondering if i could find some pointers here. Thanks
everybody for they contributions.

(i already saw the oficial PostgreSQL "advocacy" page)

The kind of questions that i ask myself are like:

. Is it really industrial strength? Where can i find articles/white
papers/etc that document it? (many people in the lists mention MySQL
and stuff like that, that's another ballgame alltogether)

. How does it compare to Oracle and the other main players in regards
of solidity, availability, trustability, dificulty of learning, installing,
mantaining?

. How powerful is its internal language (we're quite spoiled here working
with Oracle's PL/SQL which is very good...)

. Is there any article or study done of PostgreSQL from an Oracle
background: ups and downs, surprises, diferences, important
considerations, etc...

. In what cases would it be recomendable and relatively riskless to consider
using PostgreSQL instead of Oracle, and, much more importantly, in which
cases NOT.

. It seems that documentation might be sparse. How confident can one be of
obtaining technical knowledge of PostgreSQL without a very long trial and
fail path? Are there books on it?

. In the few mails that i have been checking, i saw a lot of thing with
which
i am not familiar, but... PostgreSQL is compliant with ANSI SQL, right?

. I've read an interview of Tom Lane where it comes out that PostgreSQL came
out to be faster than the other databases in some test. Anybody got a link
to
that article? tests?

. How efficient is PostgreSQL in terms of memory usage, queueing and all
these elaborated but useful (usually) things that show up inevitably in high
end products (like Oracle). (that could be rephrased as, "how not so basic
is PostgreSQL?"

etc...

I guess you see the picture.

At present all the development i am in charge of relies heavily on Oracle's
PL/SQL, but with the new ages coming up of having several tiers, and the
evergrowing needs for computing resources in front of the shrinking budgets
of struggling economies, this is something i would reconsider. PostgreSQL
places itself like a potential alternative to the oficial great actual
players, but it is really hard to trust anybody's speech right out. The
truth normally lies in many more details, known to the experienced
practicioners. I hope to be able to gather some impresions here

Thanks everybody.

Alain Gougeon
La Paz, Bolivia.