PostgreSQL 8.0 Enters Beta

gavinroy writes "As announced in pgsql-announce, PostgreSQL 8.0 Beta is now available. New features include native win32 support, Point in Time Recovery, Tablespaces, and much more! here is the beta history if you want more information."

Comments

Native Win support - awesome

[Stone316]

I think this was a major stumbling block for postgreSQL's adoption. I'd love to use it here at work for some small projects but unfortunately were getting more and more windows servers. PITR recovery is a must for any production database these days. Maybe there are some 3rd party packages but I don't think mysql supports this yet. This is great news and I hope it spurs a new round of adoption for pgsql!

Windows support

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Windows support is the only reason MySQL is so popular. PostgreSQL has always been ahead of MySQL in terms of everything but speed. But everybody is familiar with MySQL because, when you want to pick something up, you pick the one that will work with your system, and most people are on Windows.

Up until this point, you have had to install hundreds of MB of cygwin to get PostgreSQL to work on Windows. I think it's a little late to usurp MySQL's market share, especially as MySQL is now entrenched in the cheap web hosting market, but at least PostgreSQL might get the respect it deserves.

Re:I recommend Mysql users to take a look at PG

[Svennig]

Okay, I'll bite

Stored Procedures. They arent functions. Functions are different. Functions should be called inline, from within SQL statements. There should be a difference.

When looking towards migrating to an OSS database from MS SQL Server I looked into how easy it was to use the postgres stored procedure/functions/things. I couldn't find any equivalent of returing a resultset. In MS SQL you use:

CREATE PROCEDURE name AS select * from test

The only way that I could find to do that in postgres was:

1. Return a cursor reference, in which case throuch JDBC you need to obtain this horrid postgres specific class from the driver.
2. Return a set of results (or was it records, my mind fails me), but I couldn't get this to work
3. Return a set of created types, but this doesnt work well for dynamic queries and makes maintainance a headache - you'd end up defining hundreds of types!

4. So it seems that we're stuck with MS SQL server.

   If someone DOES know how to do this is a non-evil manner, please tell me! Were planning on doing an upgrade, and I'd rather not have to fork out the money for SQL Server licences etc...

replication is not a failover solution

[RelliK]

PostgreSQL supports replication BUT replication is absolutely useless as a failover mechanism because it is asynchronous. That is, when you commit a transaction, you cannnot be sure if/when it gets propagated to the slaves. For true failover you need distributed transactions. Neither MySQL nor PostgreSQL support them, but curiously, Firebird does.

Windows Native Support

[adolfojp]

I believe that native windows support for PostgreSQL is essential, not necesarily to deploy apps in that enviroment but to test and develop them. When I started using MySQL on my windows box, I had also looked into PostgreSQL. The lack of windows binaries for PostgreSQL made MySQL the default choice for me. On features alone PostgreSQL wins hand down. Also, in my experience, the faster performance of MySQL over PostgreSQL dissapears when I use InnoDB tables for transactional data processing. The doors to PostgreSQL have been open to many developers stuck in the windows world. Perhaps I will try PostgreSQL for my ASP.NET apps in addition to my trusty MySQL.

Cheers
Adolfo