On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Mark Pritchard wrote:
> > The longer that Oracle, MS, et al don't believe we're a threat, the
> > better. But I wonder how they *really* see us. This article was
> > too obviously a pile of marketing BS to be taken seriously by
> > anyone.
>
> Not necessarily - business guys are incredibly naive when it comes to
> technology options.
Some of the companies I've worked with have been seriously over committed
to vendors - one had a 2 processor license for a trivial internal
application which, had their app been designed correctly, should have
needed only a flat file data storage system. Yet all of these companies
have been extremely concerned about moving off of expensive RDBMS
software citing 'support' and 'safe-guards' ('if it breaks, we'll
sue!'). But none of this is every actually worth the cost.
The problem is more complicated, however.
Many of the Oracle DBAs who I've worked with or am friends with will curse
Oracle, for example, to the end but defend it to the death if someone else
starts criticising it. Oracle, IBM, Sybase and the like take people
earning pretty average money doing pretty average IT work and start them
out to big bucks (just like MS, Cisco, etc). These databases are their
financial livelihood and when they push product, they get paid well.
To earn this kind of money with Postgres or any open source software
requires skill, insight, enthusiasm and commitment. So, PostgreSQL does not
immediately affect Oracle, IBM DB2, Sybase etc. It affects certified DBAs
and developers working with these products.
By the same token, many of the programmers currently working on
the development of these RDBMSs have probably taken a good look at
Postgres. But this would not have been any kind of policy and therefore,
in the scheme of things, the quality of of Postgres wouldn't have
infiltrated the decision markers.
As such, the big vendors will only really take notice of Postgres once
their certified professions start to push less proprietary product. Who
knows what will happen if this takes place - maybe the same thing as is
happening with Linux and IBM and HP. That is, they'll stop ignoring it and
take it on as an 'induction' or 'entry level' system, packaging some
useless crud with it but all the time intending to sell, in the long run,
more expensive licenses.
Gavin
