3 ms·

Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time _invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever. Time I spend

Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time _invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever. Time I spend learning commercial software, even if it is shorter, is more often wasted or time/context limited. Which do you think is more useful to me today... the 100-200 hours I spent learning Access/VBA or the 300-400 hours I spent writing a bunch of library code to talk to Postgres? I still reuse some of that 8 year old DB glue, but no one has asked me to develop anything for Access 97 in quite a while :)

sanswork 19y ago
I think comparing Postgres to access is a flawed comparison. It would be more fair to compare Access to OO Base, and Postgres to Oracle in my opinion and in which case the decision of which is more valuable to learn is less clear.
- notauser 19y ago
  Except that there was (at that point) no option to learn Oracle because... it cost money. I was also using Postgres to do very similar things to Access. This is in a way part of my point about value. You wouldn't get very far proposing to use Oracle to run a five user app, and (although it has been done) only a lunatic would run a five thousand user app on Access. The price, capability and support options of Postgres are compatible with both (partly because it is open source), so you only have to learn one tool, and the time invested it has a longer life cycle too.
  - sanswork 19y ago
    That was my point. :) Oracle is to Postgres as Access is to OO Base. They can both is used to store data but they are hardly comparable so saying that learning Postgres was more valuable because Access 97 knowledge is useless is flawed. By the way up until 2005 when I removed all traces of vba work from my cv I was getting a lot of offers for Access 97-2K work which is almost the same.

3 ms·

Time spent learning (and possible improving) an open source tool is time _invested_. I will be able to carry on getting a return probably forever. Time I spend

by notauser 19y ago

sanswork 19y ago
I think comparing Postgres to access is a flawed comparison. It would be more fair to compare Access to OO Base, and Postgres to Oracle in my opinion and in which case the decision of which is more valuable to learn is less clear.
- notauser 19y ago
  Except that there was (at that point) no option to learn Oracle because... it cost money. I was also using Postgres to do very similar things to Access. This is in a way part of my point about value. You wouldn't get very far proposing to use Oracle to run a five user app, and (although it has been done) only a lunatic would run a five thousand user app on Access. The price, capability and support options of Postgres are compatible with both (partly because it is open source), so you only have to learn one tool, and the time invested it has a longer life cycle too.
  - sanswork 19y ago
    That was my point. :) Oracle is to Postgres as Access is to OO Base. They can both is used to store data but they are hardly comparable so saying that learning Postgres was more valuable because Access 97 knowledge is useless is flawed. By the way up until 2005 when I removed all traces of vba work from my cv I was getting a lot of offers for Access 97-2K work which is almost the same.