If DBA is as good as his/her backup & recovery skills, then in my opinion database is also as good as backup & recovery tools it offers. Being spoiled by superb Oracle RMAN I can’t help myself getting into depressed state when I see how amateurish backup & recovery procedures are in two favorite open source databases, MySQL and PosgreSQL. A far cry from what Oracle RMAN offers. That’s a main reason why I would stay away from MySQL and/or PostgreSQL unless I would deal with really small database (between 4 and 10GB — for databases up to 4GB OracleXE is a perfect fit).
I was pleasantly surprised when I incidentally stumbled on article that was talking about PostgreSQL backup tool, pg_rman.
PG_RMAN is obviously in the early development phase but it’s really encouraging to see that someone took the effort and tackle Achilles’ heel of PostgreSQL. Kudos to Itagaki Takahiro. We can only hope that someone will do the same for MySQL, it’s about time.