Very Computer

As for the original question. I find in a corporate environment it boils down to
who you want blame to fall to - blame tends to flow down the payee channels.

For accounts and order processing it's probably Postgresql/Oracle/DB2.

If you have a resident DBA, get the DBA to pick the database. If the DBA is you
well then if you have lots of money you may wish to pick Oracle/DB2 - because if
you're new to DB stuff and doing major stuff, you'll probably need to blame
someone else ;). If there's very small budget then it's Postgresql, but make
sure your bosses know that they're getting a lot more than what they paid for
;).

That said, installing, configuring and maintaining Postgresql is a lot easier
than Oracle/DB2. For instance there's a lot more "backward compatibility"
ugliness in Oracle. So in a less "corporate" environment I'd say go with
postgresql.

Performancewise with these three the main factor is probably going to be
how the DBA organises the data and forms the queries. The DB engines of all 3
are quite decent once you know about their various quirks[1].

Cheerio,
Link.

[1] I've come to a conclusion that if it doesn't have strange quirks it's not
an RDBMS.

Quote:> Yah. What I find is the developers set the general tone/culture of the
list.
> This affects the type of responses/support you get even from the other
list
> subscribers. So it's quite good here where you have kind and helpful

Helpful developers doesn't go near far enough..

I've seen (and still do see) commercial support that isn't up to the grade
of support I have gotten from the -general and -hackers lists. I can ask any
question and I *always* get a response within minutes from one of the core
developers.. I have yet to have a question go un-answered and I've been on
the list for a pretty long time! It just doesn't get much better than that
to me.

Thanks to all the people that have put up with my strange (and sometimes
amusing) questions!

-Mitch

Whereas for some commercial products (not all, some have excellent support),
I've had cases where they deny that there's anything wrong.

Cheerio,
Link.

This is a universal problem. It is that once a particular package reaches
that critical mass it is completely impossible for a small team of
developers to both help the user community _and_ to develop anything at
all. I've seen this in both the free and the comercial software worlds.

The  commercial world tries to solve it by having "Knowledge Base"
machinery of some kind or another. My own exp. is that it simply does not
work.

It might help to install ht://dig so that the online documentation can be
searched easily. If people think that that would be a good idea then I'd
be happy to make that contribution.

Another point is that PostgreSQL is widely used by people who have learnt
English at school. English is a proper horror of a language & it must be
extremely difficult to understand the docs. if you didn't learn English on
your Mother's knee. I learnt French at school, but I would really _hate_
to have to understand PostgreSQL from French docs. I'm suggesting that now
that the critical mass of users is nearly upon us that a serious
translation effort be made. Unfortunately I am not sufficiently able in
any foreign language to help with translation, but could perhaps attempt
to make the language of the documentation somewhat easier to understand.

--
Sincerely etc.,

 NAME       Christopher Sawtell
 CELL PHONE 021 257 4451
 ICQ UIN    45863470

 CNOTES     ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/C/tutorials/sawtell_C.tar.gz

 -->> Please refrain from using HTML or WORD attachments in e-mails to me
<<--

Quote:> This is a universal problem. It is that once a particular package reaches
> that critical mass it is completely impossible for a small team of
> developers to both help the user community _and_ to develop anything at
> all. I've seen this in both the free and the comercial software worlds.

> The  commercial world tries to solve it by having "Knowledge Base"
> machinery of some kind or another. My own exp. is that it simply does not
> work.

Quote:> It might help to install ht://dig so that the online documentation can be
> searched easily. If people think that that would be a good idea then I'd
> be happy to make that contribution.

It might also be useful to have on the lists people with a good
knowledge of PostgreSQL (at least recent versions) dedicated to
answering these questions. This would ease the load on developpers
proprio dictu.

This way, you would have a kind of a three-tiered help system :
        - Search engine on the docs, the FAQs and the lists archive ;
        - "Answer" volunteers for hard-but-answerable-from-the-specs questions
;
        - Developpers for questions requiring a good knowledge of PostgreSQL
internals.

Quote:> Another point is that PostgreSQL is widely used by people who have learnt
> English at school. English is a proper horror of a language & it must be
> extremely difficult to understand the docs. if you didn't learn English on
> your Mother's knee. I learnt French at school, but I would really _hate_
> to have to understand PostgreSQL from French docs. I'm suggesting that now
> that the critical mass of users is nearly upon us that a serious
> translation effort be made. Unfortunately I am not sufficiently able in
> any foreign language to help with translation, but could perhaps attempt
> to make the language of the documentation somewhat easier to understand.

Furthermore, PostgreSQL docs are a hell of a moving target ...
Therefore, such a project needs a *lot* of coordination.

Any thoughs ?

                                        Emmanuel Charpentier
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