I'm sure that the open source dbs could handle the read-load of our product,
but the write-load kills them. We support teacher period attendance and
teacher gradebook scaled up to the mega district (+100k students). If
attendance can't be taken at nearly instantaneous times, teachers will have
the product thrown out. At that level you need to perfectly optimize the
table schema, and index design for the quickest writes possible, and then
analyze the locking patterns and query execution paths during a full
transaction load. SQL Server's development and optimization tools are
unequaled, and their query engine is impressive. I love to rip on Microsoft
as much as every other open source user, but SQL Server has earned my
respect.
Dave
I'm curious.