Andy,
Well, to answer the question in your subject line: "no, it's not. MSSQL
sucks for everything but OLAP. It's not even in the same league as
PostgreSQL. Besides, you can *only* run it on Windows."
> I am a network/security guy not a dba. A friend is a developer/dba type. We
> often debate whether open source software is viable for the enterprise or our
> 50 person company. He doesn't know much about Linux or opensource yet is
> very dogmatic.
>
> One argument he makes repeatedly is that there is no database that is
> enterprise worthy for a cost even comparable to MSSQL. He says that
> Postegres is not even in the same class as MSSQL, DB2, Oracle. He often
> points to the db benchmarks which of course, pg is not involved in because
> you have to pay be involved.
>
> I thought that pg was on par with these, that is to say that in all but the
> most demanding applications, you would never see the difference between good
> implementations of each one.
Well, you're not going to win this argument. Often DBAs become very
attached to the databases they're familiar with; for your coworker,
Postgres will always be inferior to MSSQL because it's not as good at
being MSSQL as MSSQL is. His evaluation criteria are similar to
asking: "Which actor is the better Keanu Reeves? Keanu, or Peter O'Toole?"
That being said, here's a short list of major PostgreSQL users:
National Weather Service
Cisco
Ameritrade
Fujitsu
SRA Inc.
Sony
Yamaha
US Army
Library of Congress
Afilias (.ORG and .INFO domains)
Sun Microsystems
Federal Gov't of Venezuala
Sao Paolo Muni
NTT Data
... so I think PostgreSQL should be "good enough" for your 50-person
company. One interesting example is TravelPost.com, which is using
PostGIS with ASP.NET, and finds the performance of Postgres, even with
.NET, to be superior to SQL Server.
--Josh