Re: Oracle 10g Express - any danger for Postgres?

tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us (Tom Lane) writes:

> Jan Wieck <JanWieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com> writes:
>> On 10/31/2005 1:14 PM, Chris Browne wrote:
>>> The fact that it appears "a joke" to people wanting to deploy big
>>> databases doesn't prevent it from taking a painful bite out of, oh,
>>> say, certain vendors that forgot to own their own transactional
>>> storage engine...
>
>> It's not a joke. It fits exactly the "small web application" needs. Who
>> will want to pay for a commercial MySQL license when they can run Oracle
>> for free?
>
> People who can't figure out how to configure Postgres are not likely to
> get far with Oracle ;-). Unless Oracle has made some *huge* strides in
> ease of installation/administration with 10g, I see this making
> practically no dent in MySQL. Or PG for that matter. All they're
> really likely to accomplish is to cannibalize some of their own low-end
> sales.

You're probably right; if this release of Oracle is as complex to
install as has been typical, it won't chew up terribly much of the
"need an trivially easy to install database" market.

On the other hand, if they offer a reasonably "easy to install
default," it would indeed take some wind out of the sails (and sales;
love those homonyms) of Microsoft, where users are accustomed to a
whole lot of pointing and drooling. They don't have to do anything
about MySQL AB this month; they already did that last month with the
InnoDB OY thing...
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