Re: GNU Cash (lack of) support of Postgres

After a long battle with technology, jnasby@pervasive.com (Jim Nasby), an earthling, wrote:
> On Mar 7, 2006, at 4:30 PM, Chris Browne wrote:
>> I used to be involved with the project; haven't had time in quite a
>> while, which prevents me from being terribly influential about the
>> matter.
>>
>> What they are thinking of doing is to adopt SQLite
>> <http://www.sqlite.org/> as a storage system.
>>
>> Basically, they're NOT interested in pushing any burden of database
>> administration on users, which means they aren't keen on:
>>
>>  a) Requiring particular additional packages to be installed
>>
>>     (there is no lack of dependancies already)
>>
>>  b) Requiring management of pg_hba.conf
>>
>>     The users *they're* keen on getting are ones that want to get
>>     something to replace Quicken, to whom configuring a DBMS would
>>     seem like overkill.
>>
>> By the same token, they immediately *lose* several things, by ruling
>> out PostgreSQL in favor of pretty well anything else...
>>
>>  - PostgreSQL has Good Numeric Types for Money, and very robust
>>    data types in general
>>  - Stored procs could be very helpful for balance analysis
>>  - There are places where they could *really* use triggers
>
> Doesn't SQLite support most of that?

No.

- SQLite stores values as ASCII text.  Extremely weakly typed;
  parallel to Tcl, Perl, where "everything is a string."

- No, it has no notion of stored procs

- Well, I guess it does have triggers.

> Hopefully they'll at least keep things well architected so that it's
> fairly easy to port to PostgreSQL should someone want to do that in
> the future. But the way things are setup right now (ie: not using
> transactions very well), there wouldn't be much benefit to using
> PostgreSQL anyway...

I'd call that "not sure."  SQLite supports a notion of transactions.
I'm not sure to what degree things can get rolled back.

At any rate, if they design GnuCash to use SQLite well (e.g. -
harnessing its strengths), it will likely be nontrivial to port it to
anything else.
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