On Fri, 26 Sep 2008, Mike Miller wrote:

> We have a lot of data -- apparently about 9,000 tables in an RDBMS.  It's
> in Oracle now.  As a fan of open source solutions, I would prefer to use
> MySQL or other open source RDBMS, but at what cost?  Before I even
> consider moving data to MySQL from Oracle, I want to know what Oracle can
> do that MySQL (or other FOSS product) cannot do.  Have any of you studied
> this or do you know of any reasonably serious comparative research or
> reviews?  Thanks.

We use Postgresql at work, and it works great.  And it'd probably be 
easier to move from Oracle to Postgres than from Oracle to MySql- of all 
the open source databases, Postgres is the most like Oracle.

It also scales well.  We don't have thousands of tables, but we do have 
hundreds- several of which are at least medium-sized (pushing 100G per 
table).  And I know people who have 10's of TB in Postgres databases.  It 
also scales in terms of query complexity- we haven't noticed any problems 
with queries until you start getting 60-100 tables in the same join.

So, in your situation, I'd recommend Postgresql rather strongly.

Brian