Slashdot | Comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL 2:

'Compares very well to Oracle? In what metric?'

'Please, Oracle has a ton of features that just aren't there in PostgreSQL'

"What metric" is the right question. But I'm not convinced that the best answer is "comparative length of feature lists". One man's feature is another man's bloat, after all.

I've been writing database apps for a living since 1984. I've worked on trading systems for stockbrokers and multinational merchant banks; I've worked for telecoms giants and for manufacturers. I can't think of a single oracle feature that I've ever needed to use that wasn't available in PostgreSQL.

Admittedly, this has a lot ot do with my style - I'm old school enough that I write my logic in C, C++ or Perl and use the database purely for storing and retrieving data. DBMS vendors (and some database researchers, to be fair) would like coders to do program purely with database packages. I've always though this a supremely boneheaded idea - I trust database designers to design databases, but not progamming langauges thank you. However, if that approach appeals, then you probably need a lot more features than I do.

But they ain't necessary, and it most assuredly is possible to write non-trivial real-world apps using the PostgreSQL feature set.