On 06/24/2011 09:14 AM, Rodrigo E. De León Plicet wrote:
> Here:
>
> http://cglendenningoracle.blogspot.com/2011/06/oracle-vs-postgres-postgresql.html
>
> Any comments?
He's been working with Oracle too long, and forgotten that it's a
database not a career and a lifestyle?
More seriously: it's all about thinking habits and values, to the point
where there's almost no point arguing. The author has a completely
different view of business, risk management, product evaluation, etc.
Most notably in terms of worldview, there's the strong assumption that
you need a single owning organization to get support, and that the
organization will actually provide acceptable support at all let alone
at a reasonable price. Now, my own experience is hardly comprehensive,
but I've usually had much *better* support from 3rd parties than from a
vendor, particularly in areas where the vendor tries to lock you in to
their own support arrangements. Almost like they don't really try if
they can lock out the competition...
When you're talking with someone that invested in an organization and a
viewpoint, you're unlikely to get them to examine alternative possibilities.
It's interesting that the author fails to cover perhaps the most
important point about product selection: You should select your database
based on your needs, not your ideology. You should determine your needs,
then evaluate available options according to those needs. You might
select even a different database for different things if your needs for
those two things differ enough. For example, I prefer working with
PostgreSQL, but it wouldn't be the database I'd choose if I needed a
super-fast mostly in-memory sharded system for XML/JSON document storage
because that's not where its strengths lie.
I'm quite surprised the article didn't mention the importance of having
"somebody to sue if it goes wrong", which is a comment I often see made
re Oracle. It's lucky they didn't try to stress that point, because
evidence of succesful suits by customers against Oracle are ... hard to
come by ... and Oracle's army of lawyers makes it unlikely that suits
would succeed. Despite that and the fact that a suit is unlikely to
award damages sufficient to make up for your losses unless you can show
negligence or willful misbehavior, people keep on talking about needing
to have somebody to sue.
--
Craig Ringer
