Re: [GENERAL] Re: [HACKERS] [Fwd: SGVLLUG Oracle and Informix on Linux] - Mailing list pgsql-general

> Bruce Momjian <maillist@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
>
> | OK, let's discuss this.  How does this affect us?  [...]
> | Certain people will be tempted by a commercial SQL server, while others
> | will prefer us because of:
> |
> |     features
>
> Sorry, but I just don't buy this at the moment, for several reasons.
>
> Don't get me wrong.  I like PostgreSQL, and think it could *eventually* kick
> butt, but (as always, IMHO) it's Not Ready for Prime Time yet, not by a long
> shot.  Let's look at some of the most problematic issues at the moment:
>
>      *    No foreign keys.
>
>     This is a real kicker for a lot of people.  Foreign keys are a big data
>     integrity issue.  Fortunately, you can get around these with triggers,
>     but:
>
>      *    No SQL-based triggers.
>
>     Triggers have to be written in C, and this is a big showstopper for a
>     lot of people.
>
>      *    No OUTER JOIN (left or right).
>
>     Yes, you can simulate some of these with various UNION operators, but
>     it's definitely off the SQL mainstream.
>
>      *    32-bit OIDs.
>
>     This pretty much takes PostgreSQL out of the running for large database
>     projects.
>
>      *    Hard-to-grok source code.
>
>     Open source is great, but PostgreSQL source code still has great swaths
>     of uncommented stretches of code, and that makes it much more difficult
>     to do things like add esoteric types, or even extend the functionality
>     of existing types.  I recognize that most of this is because it's still
>     an amalgam of Postgres with the new stuff, but for PostgreSQL source to
>     be a "selling point" of the software, it has to make the job of adding
>     types and functionality *much* easier rather than merely possible.
>
> There are a wide array of other issues, too; the simplistic security, view
> limitations, administrational problems (eventually, for example, vacuum should
> be unnecessary), analysis issues, replication issues, cross-server database
> issues, index limitations, the lack of a good front end designer, the lack of a
> good report designer, locking issues, and so on.
>
> As I said, I like PostgreSQL.  It could eventually be a serious competitor to
> Oracle.  I'd love to see it do so.  But this news of commercial competitors
> will certainly eat away at a good portion of PostgreSQL's commercial customers,
> and I can't see PostgreSQL reversing that trend unless 6.5 is a major leap
> forward.

You bring up some very good points here.

Consider what we are doing.  Commercial database vendors have teams of
full-time programmers, adding features to their databases, while we have
a volunteer group of part-time developers.

Many of the missing items you mention were only added to commercial
databases several years ago.  Our database only just added subselects,
which they had years ago.  Hard to imagine how we can keep up with
commercial systems.  Fortunately, we have many features they don't have,
which we inherited from Berkeley.

Actually, a database server sits on the software complexity scale just
below compilers and OS kernels.  This is not easy stuff.

As far as our source code, I think it is very clean.  I have made it a
personal project of mine to make it clear, so other people can
understand it and hence contribute.  I know our code is cleaner than
MySQL, and I would guess it is cleaner than many of the commercial SQL
engines. Our www site has a new "How PostgreSQL Processes a Query" paper
in the documentation section, that explains the basics of how the backend
works.

So where does that leave us.  We are open source, and those running
Linux, FreeBSD, etc. already have chosen open software, so we have an
advantage there.

We clearly are the most advanced "open source" database around.  We now
have "closed source" competition.  How do we meet that challenge?

--
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