OSNews

I would have to agree totally with Josh Berkus. PostgrSQL development has been proceeding at an impressive pace. I think much of the open source community has no idea of the serious amount of brainpower behind PostgreSQL. It's not the quantity of developers, but the quality. These are people that could easily be developing for any of the top DBMS vendors, such as Oracle, IBM, Sybase, but they choose to slave away at PostgreSQL, for often very little recognition. Kudos and thanks to you all ;-).

I would say, after doing some serious study on the relational model and its implementations, that PostgreSQL implements 99% of the *logical relational* capabilities of any DBMS out there (and often supersedes these DBMS's at certain relational operations), while it implements about 85% of the enterprise-level data storage features. (notice, logical capabilities are different from storage implementation, such as tablespaces, clustering, replication, etc...)

Meanwhile MySQL is still struggling even to implement such basic things as views and triggers, with many serious constraint and integrity capabilities not even on the radar yet. For Roedling to say that MySQL provides 80% of what the "big three" are capable of is an incredible stretch. Maybe it provides 80% of what most developers use a DBMS for, but the serious databases are not "for" developers, but for the owners of the data. This is an important distinction that many developers don't understand. A developer often will deal with only a small part of a database for any one application, while the company or organization must hire data modellers and DBAs to ensure the overall integrity and conceptual unity of all company data. And yes, the data *is* important. It will be needed far longer than your application.

@Anonymous (above, responding to derek):

Your comments, I think, perfectly highlight the difference between 1) developers who grok relational databases and 2) those who don't. Please, I'm not saying one is better than the other, because often the second group will be better at other areas, such as event-driven programming, I/O, network protocols, etc... But any developer who says it is easier to write code than SQL statements falls into that second category. I personally, even though I am a developer and not a DBA or data modeller, have always found it easier (and requiring much less code) to handle logic on the database side than on the application side. I think the world needs both kinds of developers, but when it comes to the long term value of data, any dev team needs at least one developer who groks databases.