Asking Good Questions... - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

merlin.moncure@rcsonline.com ("Merlin Moncure") writes:
> Kaarel, remember that you are reading a marketing announcement.  Its
> design is to catch your eye and make you feel good about the database.
> mysql has a much stronger commercial focus, for good or for evil
> (debatable).  As a potential developer, you need to be more concerned
> with much more practical answers:
>
> 1. How does said database affect my development time?
> 2. What kind of portability issues are there?
> 3. What are the costs associated with commercial deployment?
> 4. What kind of support can I expect from the user community?
> 5. Does the database meet my technical requirements?
> 6. What are the ongoing administration costs?

That is an excellent set of questions, relevant to _any_ evaluation of
database products.  I'd suggest a couple more...

7. What kind of support can I expect from the vendor/producer, and at
what costs?

   That's often separate from "user community," and also points to the
   issue of what kinds of support _cannot_ be provided by a "user
   community" when you're dealing with proprietary software.

   For instance, if you have sufficiently severe database corruption
   problems with Oracle, it is possible to get them to fly in an
   engineer that has tools for manipulating corrupted databases that
   aren't available to the community at large.

8. What risks do I incur by choosing the software? Does the vendor
have a history of making capricious changes to the software, licenses,
or pricing?

  Apple has had a history of discontinuing products about which they
  had previously made big promises, to the point to which there are
  people who would, as a result, reject them outright from any sort of
  vendor list.  Some of the way that "Rhapsody" and Newton were dealt
  with was quite disgraceful.

  I have seen a few database products disappear as a result of vendors
  doing buyouts and/or deciding that the products weren't in their
  "strategic interests."  "SOLID" SQL Server was an interesting one;
  they wanted to get more into the "embedded" market, and the
  ~$150/host licensing option has apparently disappeared, probably to
  some users' chagrin.

  It looks like there will be some _very_ interesting shifts of
  "strategic interests" affecting the communities presently using
  MySQL and SAP-DB as a result of the conglomeration of those
  products, as well as the changes MySQL AB has been making in their
  licenses.  Those that were depending on the previous license
  arrangements for SAP-DB may need to change to anew DBMS.
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