Novell Releases PostgreSQL for NetWare

An anonymous reader writes "Ever since Oracle announced they wouldn't port 9i to NetWare, Novell has been scrambling to find an enterprise-capable DB. Now it looks like they're settling on PostgreSQL. This follows their decision to ship Apache as the default web server for NetWare 6. Linux aficionados might sneer at an old workhorse like NetWare, but it's got more than 80 million client licenses worldwide, and it ain't going anywhere anytime soon."

Comments

Novel needs to do this ..

[oh]

I'm posing from a Novel site right now. Everyone here seems to be happy with netware for the most part. It works well with the corperate desktop (yes its windows), and like all OS' when its well maintained is pretty stable. The NDS tree had all the functionality that this site needs long before Microsoft's Active Directory was released.

The only reason anyone talks about moving away from Netware is application support. This porting of Open Source apps is a good thing for Novel. If they can ship enough applications, then people won't migrate away from Netware, and if they can increase market share then more people will develop on their platform.

This could also be a good thing for Open Source. With a new group of profesional developers working on the code they could make progress on those features that the Open Source product may be lacking. They will fix bugs.

If they are smart, they will keep the most of the code base the same. If they fork too far then they won't be able to include developments made from the community. Of course, that means fixes and features added by the Novel developers would be covered by the GPL and would be given back to the community.

This sounds like a good thing for both parties. Novel gets more software to run on their servers, making their servers more attractive to customers, selling more.

Open source gets any fixed and modifications that they make. Isn't this what open source (or free software) is about, you get access to the code for free to use any way you like, provided you give everyone access to the improvements you make.

MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

[mbogosian]

If you do a Google search for "MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, you'll get a lot of hits. Here are a few that seem to be pretty informative (if not slightly dated):

here
here
here
here
here
here (not really a comparison, but read this article and the linked Postgres article for more info)

In my personal experience, Postgres has historically been the database more prepared for larger, more multi-threaded applications.

Obviously, there have been debates about which are faster in various different applications. To be honest, I have no hard data, nor have I stretched them either to their capacity, but as a user and casual developer, they are both fast enough for me not to notice.

What's inarguable exciting can be directly quoted from MySQL's own comparison of the two (listed above):

[B]oth products are continually evolving. We at MySQL AB and the PostgreSQL developers are both working on making our respective databases as good as possible, so we are both a serious alternative to any commercial database.

Re:Ummm....

[Anthony Boyd]

I've heard people swear on their souls that Postgre can stand up to MySQL, I look forward to finding out if this is really true.

Without sounding like I'm flamebaiting you, have you used many databases in your career? Do you know from experience the pros and cons of each? What drawbacks are you talking about?

You didn't sound like you were flamebaiting him much, although I cringed as I read your post, waiting for the usual comment like, "MySQL is garbage even though everyone uses it, PostgreSQL is heaven and only the blessed use it." But you didn't quite do that, although calling MySQL a DBM file is a bit hostile.

So assuming we're being reasonable, here is what each side basically knows (and exaggerates) about the other. MySQL is supposedly feature poor, an awful thing without transactions, foreign keys, subselects, and other features you would find in Oracle. MySQL is for kiddies. Supposedly. Of course, most of the lacking features were implemented long ago or are about to see the light of day in MySQL 4.1. And most MySQL users freely admit they don't even need the features. MySQL gets deployed on fast-as-hell Web sites that only need to store data and display it. MySQL is for that Web site running on a Linux box that sees waaaayy too many SELECT statements during peak seconds. Cause that's what MySQL does best, and much to the disappointment of high-end database gurus, that's ALL most Web sites need. So the tool to do that best wins that market, and the PostgreSQL fans are just sour about that. On the other side, PostgreSQL is supposedly unstable and difficult. And PostgreSQL has some big-assed speed issues. Supposedly. But most of the bugs I've ever heard people complain about are things that were solved a year ago, or more. They just keep getting rehashed. And last time I was lurking through some mailing lists, PostgreSQL had been given a serious speed boost. And the PostgreSQL fans do have a good point in one area: a lot of things Web developers do in code are supposed to be done in the database. But if all you know is MySQL, you're going to become code-heavy when you push MySQL beyond its niche. And some MySQL fans just don't get it, even as they hit the wall.

So there, I've praised and pissed on both databases. What bothers me most about the usual criticisms is how outdated those criticisms are. Try the databases now. They're both kicking serious ass. They're both going to eat into Oracle's markets. Not all of Oracle's markets. But they ARE legit alternatives in some areas.

Re:Best undelete

[evilviper]

Novell has the filesystem with the best undelete I've ever seen.

It's okay if you need to recover a deleted file. If you delete a folder, you've got to do quite a bit more work to get it back.

and it's diskspace is marked 'free/unused'.

Actually, the disk space is still marked as used, but is made available when needed. (as of Netware 5.1)

With a special undelete tool, a user can later undelete any of his file

A 'user' has to have administrative permissions ('S' IIRC) to the folder to undelete a file. To undelete a folder, you have to have Admin priv for the volume.

Besides, Windows has a Recycle Bin, Mac has the Trash, etc. Novell isn't all that great.

There are some cool things about Netware though. If a file has been unused for a while, it will be compressed to save disk space. After it continues to be unused, it will automatically be moved to your archive device (if you have one). So while you see a file on your Netware filesystem, it may actually be on a tape jukebox, and will be restored when you access it.
Did I mention that all this happens AUTOMATICALLY and TRANSPARENTLY?