Re: [pgsql-advocacy] [PERFORM] Postgres VS Oracle

achill(at)matrix(dot)gatewaynet(dot)com (Achilleas Mantzios) writes:
>> I don't want to add gas to the flamewar, but I gotta ask. What is in
>> the the 90 to 95% referred to in this email.
>
> short answer: all cases, possibly except when running a Bank or something
> similar.

No, it's not to do with what enterprise you're running; the question
is what functionality is missing.

At the simplest level, I'd say that there are Oracle (+DB2) feature
sets that *are compelling*, particularly in the High Availability
area.

However, those feature sets are ones that require spending a Big Pile
Of Money (BPOM) to enable them.

For instance, ORAC (multimaster replication) requires buying a bunch
of servers and spending a BPOM configuring and administering them.

If you haven't got the BPOM, or your application isn't so "mission
critical" as to justify budgeting a BPOM, then, simply put, you won't
be using ORAC functionality, and that discards one of the major
justifications for buying Oracle.

*NO* small business has that BPOM to spend on this, so *NO* database
operated by a small business can possibly justify "buying Oracle
because of ORAC."

There will be a lot of "departmental" sorts of applications that:

- Aren't that mission critical

- Don't have data models so sophisticated as to require the "features
at the edges" of the big name commercial DBMSes (e.g. - partitioning,
OLAP/Windowing features) that PostgreSQL currently lacks

and those two categorizations, it seems to me, likely define a
frontier that allow a whole lot of databases to fall into the "don't
need the Expensive Guys" region.
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