Postgres as the embedded database

I am looking to hear from people that are using PostGres as their backend in a commerically available product and how much work would be needed to ensure that our configurations are optimized for each platform along with normal database routines? What has the stability factor been once installed if the user has no administrative / superuser access to the database? In our application, we never allow for deletes to happen, the records get marked as "deleted", but until a archival process is run (normally every 2-3 years) the records cannot be removed.

We have used SQL Anywhere in the past and while I know that the PostGreSQL installation will be more complex than what we currently have, there are many aspects of the actual database that have made us look at it as a replacement to SQL Anywhere in our new product line.

I can say that with SQL Anywhere it is pretty much install and forget it. I'd like to have it pretty much the same with PostGreSQL. With SQL Anywhere we use their internal event processor to manage the database when it is needed. We fully expect that we will need to write our own external event processor to manage some of the database maintenance processes so that isn't really a issue.

We will have several hundred installations and what I don't want to do is significantly increase our maintenance costs with PostGreSQL to gain some of the functionality that it has (partitioned tables being one).

Best Regards,

Michael Gould, Manager Information Technology
All Coast Intermodal Services, Inc.
First Coast Intermodal Services, Inc.
First Coast Logistics Services, LLC.
904-226-0978
904-592-5250 fax