> Q: Is there a product comparison matrix (either static or
> like crash-me at MySQL)?
> http://www.mysql.com/information/crash-me.php
>
> I would like to compare:
> PostgreSQL 7.1, M$ SQL Server 7+ and Oracle 9i.
I haven't found exact comparisons either. They are good to get a general idea
about the capabilites if you would just like a starting place, however I
would not use solely such a comparison for an important decision. One problem
I found with mysql's crashme is that it was somewhat misleading. By that I
don't mean to say that the mysql team has intentionally distorted anything.
What I mean is that it is quite hard to measure exact feature translations
from different databases.
For example, mysql (an I believe mssql) uses "auto_increment" to assign a
number to a record automatically. PostgreSQL uses sequences, which are a
different approach that can accomplish the same goal. I don't think that the
mysql crashme recognizes that postgres can accomplish this task, since it
can't be accomplished in the same exact way.
So, for a real comparison, read some documentation about each database, and
determine how/if you could implement your required features in each. After
that, of course, you can see if a database seems to be more stable or faster
or easier to work with than another that met your requirements.
You can also always ask a mailing list how you accomplish a given task in
their respective database, and see if you like it more/less than another
database.
Of course, all this testing & experimentation is much cheaper with a free
database like postgres.
Regards,
Jeff
