In a , the company outlines one customer's transition from Oracle to PostgreSQL and how it chose Solaris 10 over Linux resulting from a failed test project.

The customer, "a large database marketing firm", was serviced by Maryland-based open source consultancy OmniTI.

In its report, Sun claims OmniTI's move from a proprietary application to PostgreSQL for its customer was prompted by growing database requirements that were "threatening to send software costs skyrocketing".

The company's existing half-terabyte OLTP was peaking at 10,000 transactions per second and its data warehouse was consuming 1.2 terabytes of data.

"Scaling the proprietary database application for the OLTP and data warehouse operations would be extremely expensive in light of the application's per-processor licensing requirements," according to Sun. "The open source PostgreSQL database application, on the other hand, had no licensing costs."