On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 05:43:32PM -0500, Chris Devers wrote: > On Tue, 19 Nov 2002, Walt Mankowski wrote: > > > On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 11:39:45AM -0000, Mark Buckle wrote: > > > Good, is there any real commercial benefit to an individual acquiring > > > a good knowledge of PostgreSQL rather than Oracle SQLServer ? > > > > Be careful with your terminology. Oracle is Oracle; SQL Server is > > Microsoft's RDBMS. Having said that, the main commercial benefit is > > that there are a hell of a lot more Oracle shops in the world than > > PostgreSQL shops. > > But is it safe to say that in some ways -- and for most things that one > would be likely to do while learning at home, perhaps *all* ways -- Oracle > and PostgreSQL can be treated as if they are interchangeable?
In terms of actually writing and testing code, for most projects the difference is probably almost nothing - you could very quickly cross-train yourself. Unfortunately most IT managers probably share a very simple (yet understandable, and in some cases, defendable) point of view - Oracle good, some toy OSS thing bad. Going to interview for an Oracle-related job and quoting Postgress experience is almost certainly a non-starter unless you're a very fast talker or the employer is one of the very rare few that actually knows what they're doing. On a side-note, there are enormous numbers of people whose entire career consists of "Oracle DBA" or "Oracle Consultant", many of whom are entirely ignorant of concepts I would consider fundamental to the role. I wonder if there's anyone who is an official Postgress DBA who is not really doing a load of sysadmin/developer work as well? Perhaps PG shops are enlightened enough not to require a scapegoat for "database problems"?
