On 3/7/06,
Tom Lane <
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
To be blunt, those people aren't going to be moving to Postgres anyhow.
If the notion of fixing this issue daunts them, they are not going to be
willing to deal with the other incompatibilities between Oracle and PG.
IMHO, we're not discussing incompatibilities. We're discussing functionality which PostgreSQL does not offer. The real question is should PostgreSQL offer similar functionality?
And we are *not* buying into the notion of becoming a bug-compatible
Oracle clone.
I don't think I said anything about that. Synonyms are not a bug, they are a feature which offers functionality that PostgreSQL (in some cases) cannot. I'm not saying we should clone synonyms just because Oracle has them; instead, I think we could find a way to offer similar functionality regardless of who/where the idea came from.
Like it or not, people use the proprietary functionality bigger vendors offer; that's partly why the big vendors exist. When people move towards an open source database they generally look at PostgreSQL first as we are known for being the, "most advanced open source database" but in the same breath we way things like "we're not going to copy Oracle/SQL Server/Sybase/DB2 features." You're right, we all agree that we shouldn't just add something because [insert database vendor name here] has it, but we should at least have an open mind and look at it from a functionality/migration perspective before dismissing it.
--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324