Re: [PLUG] Can Open Source Replace Oracle?

[greg@turnstep.com]

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(Pardon the late response - I have been very busy on a project.)

> That's "Minix". And it's meaningless to suggest a correlation there.
> Postgres really is based on Ingress. Linux was written as a
> *reaction* to Minix. Minix is a microkernel architecture, Linux is a
> monolithic kernel. And things get more divergent from there.

Fair enough regarding Minix - I was wrong about that. Thanks to 
you and the others for explaining it. I will pick my analogies 
more carefully in the future.

My point was that just because Postgres was *based* on Ingres does not mean 
that the Oracle vs. Ingres comparison has any relvance to comparing 
Oracle and Postgres. The latter has come a long, long way since its 
Ingres roots. (well over 10 years ago).

Don't get me wrong, I don't consider Postgres as a straight replacement for 
Oracle by any means. Oracle is still the best RDBMS out there, bar none. 
But Postgres is definitely a strong #2, and I consider its weaknesses to 
be more non-technical than technical at this point (barring the lack of 
built-in replication). I am one of Postgres' sharpest critics when it comes 
to non-technical issues in which (for example) even MySQL beats the pants 
off of it: mindshare, marketing, website, ease of use, integration with 
other applications, etc. But the underlying technology is very strong.

> Postgres's poor performance isn't just a tuning issue. In fact, it's
> mostly not a tuning issue. It's mostly a (historical, don't know if
> it's still the case) completely braindamaged (lack of) optimization
> of SQL statements. Oracle kicks everything else's ass at doing this.

It is probably not as bad now as whatever you tested. It has made great 
leaps lately, even the infamous "IN vs EXISTS" problem is resolved. 
If you have some specific examples, please pass them on, so that we can 
make the engine better. :)

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg@turnstep.com
PGP Key: 0x14964AC8 200304141320

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