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Interview With The PostgreSQL Team

Posted by timothy on from the glamor-and-decadence dept.

Gentu writes "OSNews features an interview with some members of the PostgreSQL team regarding the much needed replication feature, their competition to MySQL, their future plans and a "native" Windows/.NET port."

6 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Replication and load-balancing by SpaFF · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I can't wait until PostgreSQL has these features. Once that happens Oracle will have to run and hide. Yeah I know a ton of people will reply to this saying that Postgres doesn't have nearly the feature set of Oracle and the like, but I think for 90% of people that need a fault-tolerant database the featureset of Postgres is more than enough.

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  2. Great work for their niche by mnmn · · Score: 3, Interesting


    I've been trying to learn Postgre's useage and try it on production systems. I started out with the MySQL that the developers were sarcastic about, but realized the very different applications that need databases.. Ever since, I've been delving into db3 for lower end data management (for dbase-replacement apps) and Postgresql for higher end.

    I dont think its fair to compare Postgre with MySQL. Postgres developers work so hard to point at their features, but not all web backends require transactions or even subqueries. The basic Postgresql installation is a bit of a pain to get up and running with a basic database, which keeps pushing new users to MySQL, and the feature list gets repulsive there too.. But for applications like managing the .ORG tld registry, MySQL would not be preferred.

    I like to think Postgre as a middle to large-scale database, with DB2 and Oracle taking the 'large' end of the spectrum and mysql,minisql and the sleepycat way of dealing with data, at the 'small' end. Mysql's niche happens to be at a sweet spot where developers seek ease, speed, simplicity and functionality with PHP, Perl, C and scripts.

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    1. Re:Great work for their niche by FroMan · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The basic Postgresql installation is a bit of a pain to get up and running with a basic database, which keeps pushing new users to MySQL, [snip]

      Hmmm, even one of the developers in the article seemed to think that, which I didn't get.

      For myself I found setting up postgresql to be a cinch. It was basically an initdb, if I remember right, then createdb. One of those commands needed a path for the data. Then you run pg_ctl start. Once the database was created and started you use psql to login and create users with permissions, which I'd assume has to be done on any database. Then create tables and go at it.

      That was for setting up my home setup. I think I needed to edit one file to setup security for logins on remote hosts which was pretty self explaintory.

      The hardest part was finding a jdbc driver, which didn't take too long. I found one that claimed to be better than the one that came with postgresql and droppped the .jar in the classpath and tada, instant database.

      All said and done, just setting up and getting running probably takesless than two hours. And that was starting from emerge postgres.

      Certainly its not like oracle and all enterprise like and what not, but it was sure a heck of a lot easier to setup.

      Compared to mysql? I dunno, I'd rate it about as easy. I've setup mysql before, but it still didn't seem a clean a setup to me. That might just be me though.

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  3. What the Fuck? by Moosbert · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm Peter Eisentraut, I'm quoted in this article, but I never knew I was doing an "interview".

  4. Re:three line summary by nosferatu-man · · Score: 2, Interesting

    We're using contrib/dbmirror in production, and it works fine, if your definition of fine is "ok". We run the mirroring process every five seconds, and have a few triggers and whatnot written to facilitate a hot-swap failover.

    Our transactional volume isn't high enough yet to cause us problems (less than 30 a minute), but for now, this is ok. I'm tracking the "real" pgreplication stuff, and occasionally take a desultory trip into WAL land, when I can grab a minute.

    'jfb

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  5. Re:PostgreSQL to redefine databases by lowmagnet · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Terse? Not really. I find PostgreSQL's shell to be far easier to connect to and use than mySQL's shell. Indeed, PostgreSQL has *very* verbose help, which is a major bonus during development. I can find nothing terse about it. I couldn't figure out mySQL, but PostgreSQL's documentation got me up and running in about 10 minutes.

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