Sarah Tanembaum said:
Beside its an opensource and supported by community, what's the fundamental
differences between PostgreSQL and those high-price commercial database (and
some are bloated such as Oracle) from software giant such as Microsoft SQL
Server, Oracle, and Sybase?
Is PostgreSQL reliable enough to be used for high-end commercial
application? Thanks
Depends.
How much is your data worth?
How much will downtime cost?
How much will a commercial database cost?
PostgreSQL is a really nice little database, and has a lot going for
it:
- easy to install, admin, and use
- easy to port databases between PostgreSQL and other commercial
databases
- very high-quality implementation
However, on the other side of the coin:
- missing many of the high-end features needed in large data volumes
like partitioning, clustering, parallelism, materialized views, query
rewrite, etc.
- missing many of the high-availabity features
- missing lots of the various stuff: replication, etc
Personally, when I've got a lot of value in my database I typically
opt for a commercial offering. But there are those exceptional
situations - like:
- no budget
- just want to prototype
- it's read-only data and you can create a dozen small databases
- the data isn't super-valuable
Then in these cases - PostgreSQL is a nice little product, and I
wouldn't hesitate to use it. Much better, btw than its primary
competitor - MySQL with its limited, non-ansi sql, and amazing
exception handling irregularities.
kenfar