Re: Unanswered questions about Postgre

> Joel Burton wrote:
> >
> > On 30 Nov 2000, at 11:58, Joe Kislo wrote:
> > > If you don't believe me, here's two fully SQL-92
> > > compliant databases, Oracle and interbase, which do not exhibit
> > > this behavior:
> >
> > Ummm... havings lots of experience w/it, I can say many things
> > about Oracle, but "fully SQL-92 compliant" sure isn't one of them.
> > :-)
>
> Nice! I was just reading some article benchmarking Postgre against
> interbase.. They said interbase was fully SQL-92 compliant, so I
> just, well gosh, assumed it's expensive brotheren were compliant too
> :)

Well, Oracle is "entry-level SQL92 compliant", but there's still lots of
wiggle room for nonstandard, nonfunctional stuff. Not that it's a bad
database--I always think of it warmly as a Soviet Tank (large,
heavy, ugly, and gets the job done by flattening lots of stuff.)
IMHO, it's *less* SQL compliant on many points that PostgreSQL.
(See the discussion in the last month about NULL v empty-string
handling in strings, where Oracle clearly fails an important SQL
standard that we pass w/flying colors.)

Although I think it's biased in many regards, MySQL's crash-me
(www.mysql.com) has lots of direct comparison info about many
different databases. They tend to overplay lots of minor things (like
billions of obscure functions), and list critical things like, oh,
transactions, subselects, procedural languages and such in one line,
but, still, it has lots of info.

What's nice about PostgreSQL is that, while it hasn't always had
every SQL92 feature (like outer joins, etc.), it seems to have less
legacy, nonstandard stuff wired in. :-)

--
Joel Burton, Director of Information Systems -*- jburton(at)scw(dot)org
Support Center of Washington (www.scw.org)