Re: why postgresql over other RDBMS

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On 05/24/07 10:30, Alexander Staubo wrote:
> On 5/24/07, Richard Huxton <dev@archonet.com> wrote:
>> Tom Allison wrote:
>> > You've addressed cost and performance.
>> > Not much left.
>> >
>> > Try it out for yourself and see if it works for you.
>>
>> + elephant in logo
>> - unpronounceable name
>> + excellent mailing lists
>> + excellent developer community
>> - you can download as many copies as you like and a salesman still won't
>> take you out to lunch
>
> + Friendly toolset in the box. [1]
> + Transactional DDL. [2]
> + Table inheritance, if you care to use unportable features.
> + Extensibility. [3]
> + PostGIS for spatial extensions.
> - Replication offerings suck.
> - Warm standby involve a lot of manual labour.
> - Point-in-time recovery involve a lot of manual labour.
>
> [1] psql+readline, pg_dump etc. are a breeze compared to crusty Oracle
> tools; psql feels distinctly modern compared to MySQL's crummy
> interpreter.
>
> [2] Nobody else has this, I believe, except possibly Ingres and
> NonStop SQL. This means you can do a "begin transaction", then issue
> "create table", "alter table", etc. ad nauseum, and in the mean time
> concurrent transactions will just work. Beautiful for atomically
> upgrading a production server. Oracle, of course, commits after each
> DDL statements.

Rdb/VMS and CODASYL DBMS (both Oracle, formerly DEC, products) also
have transactional DDL.  Actually, I was quite stunned to discover
that Oracle doesn't do that.

Interbase/Firebird probably also has transactional DDL.

> [3] PostgreSQL can be extended with new domain types, stored-procedure
> languages (eg., PL/Python, PL/Perl), functions (eg., dblink,
> fuzzystrmatch, cube), and indexes (GiST, GIN). Together this allows
> projects such as TSearch2 and PostGIS to be implemented as separate
> extensions to PostgreSQL.

- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA  USA

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!

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