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On Wed, 10 Jun 1998, Sean Witham wrote:

> Does anyone on the list have any experience/knowledge/hear-say of both
> PostgreSQL and mySQL.

I have used both, although I have more experience with PostgreSQL, so I
will restrict my comments to PostgreSQL, and let someone with more time
logged with MySQL speak for that product.

PostgreSQL is, in short a robust, real-world database system which scales
reasonably well in the real world.  It supports network access well, and as
of very recently, has patches available to support encrypted remote access
as well.  It provides a large subset of the current SQL standards, and has
some interesting extensions as well (strong geometric datatypes come
immediately to mind).

PostgreSQL comes with interfaces allowing it to be used from C, C++, TCL,
Perl, and python, as well as adapters for JDBC and ODBC connections.  It
also supports a weak form of stored procedures written in TCL.  It ships
with a SQL shell environment, psql, analagous to isql under Sybase, and a really
spiffy graphical environment, pgaccess, which includes, among other things
a graphical query generator, report generation, and even a form builder
which generates TCL/Tk code as output.

> I was interested in how they compared when used as a central databased
> that could be accessed via a web server , jave clients, and obdc
> compatable clients on windows.

I currently access PostgreSQL pretty heavily from a range of CGI and FastCGI
scripts written in TCL, and doing the same from Perl should be no harder.
The TCL interface to PostgreSQL is really remarkably simple to use.

I hit the same databases from a few applications written in java, using the
JDBC driver which ships with PostgreSQL, and have had no problems to this
point.  FWIW, JDBC should also function correctly in a servlet context.  I
use the Apache servlet support (http://java.apache.org/, and use the
FreeBSD JDK 1.1.5) in a few places, but have not explicitly tried to use JDBC
in this setting.

There are also modules out their to allow Apache to pull BLOBs (Binary
Large OBjects) out of PostgreSQL directly, and to allow Apache to use
a PostgreSQL table for authentication data.

Another product you may be interested in is PHP (http://www.php3.org/),
which is a `Dynamic Web Page Language', implemented as a module for Apache,
with support for a range of databases, including PostgreSQL and mySQL.

> Of cousre it will be runnign on NetBSD and with Apache as the web
> server.

Of course.  The above experience is primarily logged under NetBSD/i386,
FWIW.

- -- 
				Jim Wise
				jwise@unicast.com

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