Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Migrating from ASP to *nix: Shane does Pg Shane ponders how to approach the learning curve involved in rip-and-replace of MSSQL Server with PostgreSQL. http://www.skippingdot.net/2002/10/14 I'm building my OpenACS portability framework on Windows using Cygwin/PostgreSQL, because it's important to me that it work there. I had a couple hiccups with prior releases, but this Pg version actually installed itself in the background. I hit a lot of checkboxes in cygwin's setup utility and it was just there. There was a little bit of tweaking with the ipc-daemon, and an very occasional wedging (once/month), but it works fine for development. There wasn't much in the way of a learning curve, and all the tools (createuser, pgplsql, pgdump etc) seemed to be there and working. So even if your ultimate deployment environment is unix, I wouldn't dismiss cygwin/postgresql out of hand. I had emailed Shane to go the third way - use a VMWare linux instance to run headless services (pg/apache/samba), and continue using your familiar tools to edit the native *nix application files. I'm convinced this is the fastest way to go from zero to Linux database developer, and I wrote a paper about it. 9:44:51 PM      comment []  trackback []

ISOC to use Postgres to run .org (via Lars) http://pinds.com/blog/archive/2002/10/#blog-entry-5887 Check out this discussion group thread (via Talli) on choosing the database for the .org registry. The first message is some classic FUD from an Oracle marketroid. It states, (paraphrasing) "Postgres/Open source db's don't have some of the most esoteric features we've packed into our commercial db offering that almost none of our clients derive any value from. And since the competition is free, we're killing them on market share (calculated by revenue). Therefore, choose us." Stress differentiation, focus the client on features they don't need... sales tactics 101. A message in response states, "Hey, we've been using Pg to manage our registry under serious load for quite some time and it has worked great." There's nothing like real-world counter-FUD to make marketing claims look silly. [Aside: They forgot to add, "We're the folks who got California to pay $95M for $40M worth of software. Mu-ha-ha" There's a selling point. ;-) ] 10:57:10 AM      comment []  trackback []