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There are positives as well as negatives for PostgreSQL, Ingres, and Firebird. All the three have similar features. It’s really difficult to justify the best among the three. It’s a particular feature in the wish list or inclination with (out) reasons (like the support community which is usually positive,
But an opinion clash could always be there) – which impacts in the choice. All the three have their limitations and have also proved their worth as a part of successful enterprise Ecommerce solutions

In general, most Open Source database features are supported by all databases with minor OEM application development. To name a few, we can categorize them as follows:

• SQL Compliance
• ACID compliance, Locking and concurrency support, Foreign
Key constraint & Transaction support
• Functional features:
1.  Views, schemas, sub-select, stored procedure, triggers, xml support
2.  Tablespace feature
3. UNICODE support
4.  API support
• Non-functional factors:
1.  Performace & Availability
2. Stability & Flexibility
3.  Web and Data-warehousing strengths
4.  Security, Authorization, and SSL support
5.  Replication, Load-balancing, and Clustering support
6.  Ease of installation, configuration, management, and administration
7.  Hot backups
8.  Admin and migration tools/scripts
9.  Easy to learn & use
10.  Good documentation
11.  Distribution License & Support

It would be a continuous task to figure out what features distinguish one database from others. To begin with, here are a few pointers

Comparison of Selling Points

MySQL Points in favor -• This is the most widely accepted open source database in use. This simple reason is quite compelling to select among various options.
• It claims to be comparatively easier to learn and use.
• The popularity provides for a lot of options in Administrative
tools.
• The architecture provides for plugging storage engines.
Many options exist in the market to cater to various needs e.g. InnoDB.
• Commit grouping, gathering multiple transactions from multiple connections together to increase the number of commits per second.
• It is available on Novell Netware OS also besides the generic lot of Win, UNIX, and Mac family.

Points against it -•

Even the current version lacks many SQL RDBMS features.

For instance, its handling of dates allows storing a date with a day beyond the last day of a month with less than 31 days, and arithmetic operations are vulnerable to either integer overflow or floating point truncation. Though these can be taken care of by running special SQL modes.
There are many such features that have been criticized and are slowly being taken care of in newer releases. Version 5.0, for example, supports views, stored procedures and cursors, and version