As a followup to this interview with Robert Treat and Jason Gilmore (authors of the recently published book Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8), TechTarget has posted some comments from Oracle DBAs reacting to comparisions made in that interview between PostgreSQL and Oracle.
Most comments are quite favourable towards PostgreSQL, though evidently there's still a knowledge gap that needs to be bridged:
Allen was unimpressed by the fact that in PostgreSQL, stored procedure parameters are not typed. "Everything is passed as strings, even integer arrays," he said.
And one comment in the interview's feedback section is from someone who obviously doesn't know what he / she is talking about.
Slashdot has also picked up the story.
Jason Gilmore and Robert Treat kindly sent me a copy of their latest
book "Beginning PHP and PostgreSQL 8: From Novice to Professional"
(pictured on the right, though if you're reading this via a feed
the image won't be visible). Unfortunately I haven't had time to
go through it in depth yet; a detailed review will follow ASAP.
(I'm in the middle of a PHP-based project, and as a non-PHP-specialist
it looks like I'll be able to give it a proper "road test").
More information is available on the Apress website.
Unfortunately the conversion to the blackhole storage engine didn't go as
smoothly as planned, due to unexpected date-time dilation effects along the
event horizon. Details are sketchy ("Query OK, ∞ rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)"), but it appears the insertion
of a date with the value 0000-00-00 into the black hole
would have introduced an irreconcilable paradox into the Einsteinian
space-time continuum and caused life as we know it to end.
Fortunately I was able to import the emergency reserve system
from the backup punchcards using PostgreSQL's COPY
command.
The post-mortem disaster review has lead me to the conclusion that I should have obtained this particular MySQL certification first.
You may have noticed that this site hasn't been updated very much in recent months. That's because I've been busy reengineering the site to make it fully Web 2.0-compliant. Unfortunately my graphic designer is off sick, so the curvy borders weren't ready in time for the relaunch, but rest assured they will make their appearance once the AJAX interface is complete.
One of the most important changes has been to the backend database. While PostgreSQL has served me well over the past few years, I feel the time has come to give MySQL a try, because it seems everyone is using it for their websites these days. Indeed, it is causing such a stir that even renowned companies such as Oracle have acquired a stake in strategic MySQL technologies such as InnoDB. I've listed some of the reasons for my move below.
The third, and possibly final beta for the next PostgreSQL version, 8.1, has been released for general testing. As well as the usual source tarballs a Win32 binary is also available.
- Source: http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/v8.1beta
- Windows binary: http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/binary/v8.1beta/win32
- General Beta Information: http://www.postgresql.org/developer/beta