[adamnemecek]

Lol, I've been saying something like this for some time.

Thanks for the answer. I guess what I'm interested is somewhat obscure/historical operating systems and also HW that are in some way superior to currently popular solutions. The more comparative the better.

Also your reading list has quite a few Oracle SQL entries so I'm guessing it's your preferred DB of choice. What features are you using that aren't available in MySQL or Postgres?

[trentnelson]

As far as commercial vendors go I really preferred SQL Server from about version 2000 onwards. I got into Oracle again recently for a consulting project with a finance client (who basically have unlimited Oracle licenses) and really quite enjoyed it since the Oracle 7/8 days.

You can do some phenomenally sophisticated things... I extensively leveraged things like partitioning, parallel execution (dbms_parallel_execute!), lots of PL/SQL using the pipelined table cursor stuff, data mining stuff (dbms_frequent_itemset!), index-organized tables, and my god, bitmap indexes were a godsend, direct insert tricks for bulk data loading, external tables were fantastic (you can wrap a .csv in an external table and interact with it in parallel just like any other table -- great for ingesting large amounts of janky .csv data from other parts of the business).

The parallel execution and robust partitioning options were probably the most critical pieces that have no particularly good counterpart in open source land.

[Joeri]

They also have a text mining engine which lets you dump almost any filetype in the database and do sophisticated full text queries, including generating html snippets with highlighted matches. And they have a native column type for storing geometry, so you can do geometric queries and aggregates, for which they then also have a web viewer engine with tiled maps support, so you basically have the core of a GIS engine. There's a ton of cool stuff in there, I haven't even looked at half of it.

[trentnelson]

Oh man how did I forget the geo stuff! I used that extensively! The custom indexes that could do lat/lon proximity joins! And yeah the text mining stuff is great as well. (Ugh, I've forgotten so much already -- such a shame.)

[jamespo]

I always thought the external table functionality was a terrible idea, but if the use case is just for import that's more reasonable. Don't you like SQL*Loader or something ;)

[trentnelson]

It's great when you need to whip something up quickly. My workflow was to create foo_ext, poke around at the data and get some sensible column defaults, then `create table foo select * from foo_ext`. Worked really well, especially for once-off or infrequent stuff.

For batch-oriented stuff where you're getting pretty consistent data at a regular interview I'd go with SQL*Loader.