Re: MySQL interview, no mention of PostgreSQL

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 10:59:03PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> I bet the win32 port will help advocacy a lot. The other thing that
> would help I think would be to make it as friendly as possible for ISPs
> to do virtual hosting. Schemas are probably helping that a lot already,
> and the only other thing I can think of in that area would be resource
> monitoring/control. I'm not suggesting that MySQL is better for virtual
> hosting, but perhaps if PostgreSQL makes it easier than that will give
> us an edge.

I'd think a 'translation' guide would help just as much, if not
more. A guide that says in Oracle, you use 'describe tablename', in
Postgres, you use '\d tablename'. It's there, it's just different.
Same goes for MySQL stuff. I know this was one of my major
frustrations when learning Postgres, is just the minor differences
like that. I realize that this stuff is available via other means,
but having a translation guide would be very helpful as well.

Also, keep in mind that a lot of developers aren't DBA's. Many
people that use the 'LAMP' platform have only used MySQL, and maybe
a handful of other things. They're used to writing their
applications to have a fair amount of database logic in the
application itself, simply because it's not possible with MySQL.

What I had in mind on this topic would be some simple
databases and documentation  that
would outline some of the more advanced features of Postgres, like
triggers, stored proceedures and so on. First, describing what the
function is, or what it does, then moving on to why you should use
it. I suppose, an 'Advanced SQL in a nutshell' guide.

Just my $.02 worth. :)

Tim