Dave Page wrote:
> Too many of those caveats, and it's easy to see how we can be
> discounted early in the evaluation phase. It's not helped that often
> these lists will be drawn up by people used to working with the
> commercial DBMSs, so we probably wouldn't get extra points for having
> a dozen procedural languages, or other features that are largely
> unique to PostgreSQL, no matter how cool and useful they are.
Yep, this is illustrating something that is pretty basic to open source
--- that is open source often provides the tools for a solution, rather
than a complete solution. I often think of open source as providing a
calculator with wires sticking out, rather than calculator buttons; the
wires allow more flexibility, but they are harder to use.
Personally I think the calculator/wires approach is better from an
engineering perspective, but it can be a handicap in the user experience
and checkbox categories --- ease of use is perhaps not our strong point.
Much of our open source value is being different, in both cost,
reliability, and configurability.
-- Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
+ If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +
