>> A friend of mine who writes database
engines for a major vendor observed that SQL Server people do not trust

their optimizer like Ingres, Postgres, DB2 people do. That is a bad
thing to say about the product.
<<

that really depends on your perspective. For many practitioners RDBMS
as the whole package is much much more than just the optimizer. In many
situations the _whole solution_ implemented with SQL Server (including
DTS, reports, Web services etc.) is quite cheap to develop and to
maintain.

What's the point of developing the best optimizer in the world if all
the other links of the chain are weak?