[Pherdnut]

Alright so somebody with experience in a wide variety of DBs help me out here. Are the enterprise solutions really any more scalable than something like postgresql or is it more that they're more accommodating an enterprise mentality where you'll tend to run into more skill level diversity on the extremes and team A often doesn't necessarily have team B's expertise at stuff? By accommodating of course I mean willingness to take a buttload of money to help teams out with problems when needed and/or to blame when their mistakes explode in their faces and to never ever try to tell anybody that they're doing it wrong once VIPs with enough hit dice are invested in that sort of thing.

I do gather that a lot of DB admins that aren't very political about it do in fact respect MS SQL for some of its more competitive features. I'm just wondering if there's any reason to start with it for a low-cost startup scenario that could ultimately result in a non-trivial but fairly straightforward DB schema with potential for being used by very large institutions (universities at the largest I'd imagine).

I'm ignorant enough (primary experience is in web UI) that I'm leaning towards postgresql because I like the way the Django guys think and they seem to dig it. Also the no-nonsense license and yes, the not-profit-motivated thing is nice when backed by a strong core group which I gather postgres has.

But do the enterprise DB solutions handle severely massive amounts of scale better for some reason? Or is it more that they're culture-friendly to the sorts of companies that typically handle DBs of this nature?