In response to this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/24/ingres_and_open_source/
Hi Philip,
Speaking as someone who has jumped from Oracle to Postgres, mostly for cost reasons, I’m curious about what the relationship is between Ingres and Postgres. I thought Postres was Ingres. I obviously haven’t been following it too well.
The other thing about this database is that it is a much better implementation of the relational model. I can create proper domains that describe what a thing is instead of some techie crap like varchar(27) maybe or maybe not being a soundex code (or whatever). I like this because you can see what a table is supposed to do when you look at its description. Oracle still haven’t understood this.
Apropos Oracle, a lot of my friends say that they’d be very happy with an open-source (or just virtually free) version of the old Oracle 7.3.4, perhaps with the 8.1.5 PL/SQL engine. I would say that most of us just want a reliable data store and don’t give a stuff about all of the high-end stuff. 9i RAC and 10g – who gives a toss, really, apart from the half-dozen big corps (mostly telcos) that need big databases. I don’t care about Java in the database either, quite happy running it in the middle tier where it belongs, or just using PHP because it takes a tenth of the time to do something useful without fity squnitillion XML files that are sometimes ignored in some middle-tier framework that’s too hard to use.
Don’t get me started on their Applicaton Server – was a nice usable thing and is now a pregnant elephant in a temper with more layers than an alpine climber. In the light of which I’d like to see an article looking at the relative merits of JBOSS, OAS and WebSphere in the real world. Are there any plans to do anything like that?
Somewhat off the point but never mind.
Regards