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and PostgreSQL has pgFouine http://pgfoundry.org/projects/...

To be fair, there is some confusion between people like yourself, who advocate the user's freedom to choose whether to use free only software, and the anti-GPL crowd, who advocate a developer's right to choose whether their addition are free or not.

While I am all for the user's freedom to not use free software (and, in fact, the non-free repository is enabled on my machines, and like I said, I do have some proprietary software installed), whenever I choose a license for free software that I write from scratch, I (usually, there are exceptions) choose a copyleft license.

I think the heat from the later argument is warming up the former argument, despite the fact there are few good arguments to limit a user's freedom of choice for the sake of giving her more freedom.

Shachar

At the moment neither MySQL nor Postgres guarantee AIX ODBC driver support.

Is AIX ODBC any different from regular ODBC?

Let us say that was true. (It isn't, but let's pretend.) MySQL is faster than PostgreSQL or Ingres, correct? Then use PostgreSQL or Ingres for your primary storage DB, and use MySQL to store cached responses. (Key issues, etc, are then a non-issue - you don't need a vast key to identify a cached pre-generated page.)

Why use MySQL just to cache responses? People who use PostgreSQL for the backing store just put some memcache-style layer in front for that. That's even faster than MySQL, and you don't have the complexity of a second database to worry about. You can use something very database aware like pgmemcache. Most people pick their cache mechanism based on integration with their application development environment though. On Java use a cache that integrates well with Tomcat+Hibernate+JDBC, etc.

What are the compelling differences?

Security. Scalability. And recently, raw performance with more much more room through to exist. Superior query plan general for non-trivial queries; which also goes to the first three items listed. Extensibility such that MySQL can't even be compared. Geospacial capabilities with indicies + ACID. PLs for stored procedures and a multitude of choices and capabilities. Real life deployments where ACID accounts; compared to MySQL where people generally use it as a large, non-ACID storage retrieval system where data inconsistencies are typically also allowed, rather than an ACID-compliant RDBMS.

In all seriousness, for the vast, vast majority of users, the only literal advantage MySQL has over PostgreSQL is DB upgrade paths, and even then, huge strides are being made on the PostgreSQL front. See PG Migrator. Huge improvements have been made since the 7.x days. See the docs for more info.

Thats perfectly fine and well, but can you put two different schemas in two different boxes? no, you can't.

Depending on what you're trying to achieve with that, you could store the data with partitioning and network file systems (not that I'd risk my data that way). But can you actually do hr.employee.id=job.task.employee on mysql when hr and job are "databases" on different servers?

Anyway, if you really have an external database (that may be somewhere entirely different) there's DBlink and its friend DBI-Link.

Upgrade in place is done via pg_migrator.

VACUUM now makes use of a "visibility map", which means that it doesn't need to process old data each time VACUUM is run. If you run VACUUM on a large table, and then immediately run it again, the second run will be instant.

The recursive queries are the SQL standard common table expressions, that is, WITH and WITH RECURSIVE.

The window functions is a great addition, but with PostgreSQL it's even better because you can define your own custom window functions with CREATE FUNCTION.

There are also a huge number of little improvements, like "auto explain" which is a module that can automatically log the "EXPLAIN ANALYZE" output when a query takes a long time. This is a great convenience for DBAs, because you don't have to look at long-running queries in the log and attempt to EXPLAIN ANALYZE them manually.

Have you heard the news (from Ceiling Cat)? http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pllolcode/

There are several ways to do cross-database JOINs in Postgres including dblink, and even to other DBMSs via dblink-tds and DBI-Link, but try schemas first, as another poster mentioned.

There are several ways to do cross-database JOINs in Postgres including dblink, and even to other DBMSs via dblink-tds and DBI-Link, but try schemas first, as another poster mentioned.

You can use DBI-Link for this kind of thing :)</>

Better still, install DBI-Link http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link/ inside PostgreSQL, migrate once and have done ;)

Pardon the self-promotion, but you can find DBI-Link at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link/ and on EPEL for RHEL/CentOS. Oh, and it's not restricted to MySQL. You can use any DBD with a certain minimal feature set, and I'm trying to reduce that minimum.

THERE IS NO ODBC FOR LINUX (or equivalent).

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/mysqlcompat/
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/my2postgres/

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/mysqlcompat/
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/my2postgres/

I've written a thing called DBI-Link http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link/

which helps do the job by making data sources easily available, one to the other. Of course, it's not done yet, but it's a long way in the right direction :)

Get your Solaris 10 PostgreSQL binaries here.

Crystal Reports can connect to an ODBC data source and psqlODBC is the official PostgreSQL ODBC Driver.

Yup, and meanwhile PostgreSQL is prepping an 8.1 release with shared row locking, table partitioning, and better SMP support. Draft press release is here.

Anecdotally, RubyForge got 240K hits yesterday on a GForge site backed by a PostgreSQL 8 database with no problems; good times. PostgreSQL is good enough that our problem is bandwidth, not server load.

PostgreSQL is trying to centralize things at pgfoundry.org so these things should be a little easier to find.

Unfortunately, projects like pljava are still on gborg, which is an older system that they're moving away from.

Yes.

For master/slave, use slony.

http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/slony1/projdis play.php

For multi-master, use pgcluster.

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgcluster

Yep, that would be me. It's been a long strange trip, but eventually I ended up in the CS department at the University of Iowa.

How would it work for a site like OKCupid? Their matching algorithm is based on users' responses to multiple-choice questions -- assume each response has some numeric (enumerated) value. Throw all those values into a table, probably via a join, such that each row is a user and each field corresponds to a question. (Let NULL values correspond to questions a user hasn't answered.) You in front of your computer will be looking at people's profiles, but the system operates under the assumption that the person will answer questions in a manner consistent with their profile, so if you mark several people that you're interested in and several that you're not interested in, based on their profiles, the system can train a classifier based on their answers to questions and find people whose responses are similar.

I don't think OKCupid is using the same math I'm using, but their approach is probably pretty similar.

Geocoding isn't hard. It just takes about 50 lines of code combined with a decent streets database. Add PostGIS to your postgres streets database and you can even easily geocode intersections like "43rd And Pine Streets".

But, the only public domain streets database is the TIGER data, several years old already. However, ESRI does make it publicly available in shapefile format, ready for importing to postgres.

Maybe I've found a new project to start. Or at least a HOWTO to write.

Geocoding isn't hard. It just takes about 50 lines of code combined with a decent streets database. Add PostGIS to your postgres streets database and you can even easily geocode intersections like "43rd And Pine Streets".

But, the only public domain streets database is the TIGER data, several years old already. However, ESRI does make it publicly available in shapefile format, ready for importing to postgres.

Maybe I've found a new project to start. Or at least a HOWTO to write.

...SQL Performance Tuning is an excellent book. It has a lot of good discussion on when to use certain SQL contructs and how to check your database to ensure you're actually getting improvements.

PLUG: Which SQL queries are taking the most time? PQA home page, download.

I encourage you to examine PostgreSQL 8.0 upon it's release, which will most likely be November or December of this year.

It fits your requirements perfectly without requiring the commercial license. Of course the installer bit depends also on your application, but it shouldn't be too hard to do. You may want to check out the pginstaller project here: http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller/.

...has had this for a while already.

No reason to use MySQL, now that the PostgreSQL crowd finally got their act together and provided windows binaries.

For those of us that use Windows there's now a Windows version of PostgreSQL available. Check it out at here and here.

Apologies to Ziff-Davis...

From: "Marc G. Fournier"
To: pgsql-announce ( at ) postgresql ( dot ) org
Subject: PostgreSQL 8.0.0 Officially Goes Beta
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 21:36:52 -0300 (ADT)

After almost 9 months of development, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is proud to announce that development on PostgreSQL 8.0.0 has now finished, and is ready for some serious testing.

For those wondering about the 8.0.0 designation on this release, there have been several *very* large features included in this release that we felt warranted the jump. As with all of our releases, we aim to have this one as rock solid as possible, but *at least* one of the features added to this release involved such changes that may warrant a bit extra testing post-release before deploying it in production.

Although the list of new features in 8.0.0 is extensive, with both SMB (Win32 Native Support) and Enterprise (Nested Transactions and Point in Time Recory) features being added, there is one thing that hasn't been included as part of the core distribution, and that is a Windows Installer, which can be found at:
http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller

For a complete list of changes/improvements since 7.4.0 was released, please see:
http://developer.postgresql.org/beta-history.txt

That said, and without further ado, Beta 1 is currently available for download on all mirrors:
http://www.postgresql.org/mirrors-ftp.html

And, thanks to David Fetter, the Beta is also available via BitTorrent at:
http://bt.postgresql.org

As with all releases, the success of this release falls in the your hands ... to go from Beta -> Release, we need as many people out there to put it through her paces as possible, on as many platforms as possible. We urge anyone, and everyone, to download a copy and run her through her regression tests, and report any/all problems, and bugs, to
pgsql-bugs ( at ) postgresql ( dot ) org

The more bugs we can find, and eliminate, during Beta, the more successful the Release will be...

On behalf of all of the developers, Happy Bug Hunting ...

...some on PGFoundry, some still on GBorg.

PLUG: For example, there's this little SQL query analysis utility!