I recently stumbled upon the free open source PostgresSQL
(http://www.postgresql.com).

In my opinion, this is one of the most advanced, FREE/open source RBM
systems I have ever come across. It is practically easy to migrate
Oracle databases to this since it supports _practically_ everything
Oracle does. But it is also FREE. No expensive licensing costs. If you
have one cpu, you pay nothing! If you have 10 cpus, you still pay
absolutely nothing! What a novel idea!

In my opinion, if you are bent over a barrel and paying out of the wazoo
and wasting being irresponsible with company and shareholder money, read on:

Be advised that there are some here that like being bent over a barrel
and like to take it in the rears and pay through the nose for overpriced
commercial software. They will denigrate and attack this message like
they attacked early Christians. Be brave and read on:

First of all, even though it is open source, there is commercial support
for those who need it, but if you are already an Oracle DBA.. it should
be very easy.

Http://www.Enterprisedb.com will offer commercial support:

Enterprise compatibility

EnterpriseDB works in the manner your company expects of its database
management software, with world-class 24/7 support, a deep portfolio of
professional services and training, and assured reliability,
scalability, and flexibility.

Oracle® compatibility

EnterpriseDB has taken the world’s most advanced open source database -
PostgreSQL – and enhanced it so that most applications written for
Oracle will run on EnterpriseDB without modification, protecting
investments in applications. Meanwhile, EnterpriseDB also maintains full
compatibility with native PostgreSQL.

Budget compatibility

EnterpriseDB’s pricing represents a significant drop in the price point
at which enterprises can fulfill their relational database software
needs. And linear pricing ensures that price is always proportional to
your needs; no more exponential license cost growth.



Tablespaces:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/s...blespaces.html

Support for a ton of server-side languages:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/s...ogramming.html

PlSQL support:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/static/plpgsql.html

Truely object oriented with inheritence:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/s...heritance.html

More Data types:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.0/i.../datatype.html

BASF case study:
http://www.postgresql.org/files/abou...gresqlv1.2.pdf