We recently finished some evaluations of Oracle, and one of the things which jumped out at me, PostgreSQL booster that I am, was that in 9i Oracle has finally surpassed PostgreSQL in some elements of object-relational technology. Among the things you can do are:
- Create new compound object types on the SQL command line. So for example, the "imaginary numbers" example in the PostgreSLQ manual could all be done on the command line. - Address components of objects using dot-notation. (select employee.salary from employees) - Index objects based on their components (create index blah_idx on employees (employee.last_name)) In combination with ARRAY data types, and references, you can do pretty fancy things without ever creating a C library. PostgreSQL seems to have most of the underpinning already. I even did some experimenting with the "tables as a datatype" stuff. However, it's definately incomplete. In the tables-as-datatype example, you cannot get the objects to reconstruct themselves, you have to do it by hand. And while oid's make handy reference holders, there does not seem to be any particular performance benefit to doing object-oriented modelling over relational modelling in PostgreSQL at this point. By contrast, OORDBMS like Informix can be blazingly fast when used with the proper OO model. (Oracle performance enhancement for OO models is mixed at best right now.) Bruce Momjian wrote: > Does anyone have additions for the list. I didn't see anything > discussed that jumped out at me, though I didn't see "Conquer the world" > on there. ;-) ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org