[Courses] [Postgresql] What is PostgreSQL?

[Catherine Devlin]

Hi, everybody!

> - Give us a brief intro to yourself, and why you are taking this course

I'm Catherine Devlin, a chemical-engineer-turned-DBA in Ohio.  I got
hired as an Oracle DBA, fell in love with Python, declared myself the
PyOraGeek, and soon learned that Python people usually think
"postgres" when they think "RDBMS".

I've dabbled enough with postgres to know that I agree with them - I'd
use it over MySQL or even Oracle any day, if it were up to me.  (For
instance, I adore postgres error messages:
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2007/04/good-errors-vs-bad-errors.html
)  But, because my day job keeps me busy with Oracle instead, I
haven't had time to get very deep with postgres.  I hope this class
will give me that chance.

> - If you haven't already, think of a concrete project you'd like to use
> PG with.

I've used postgres mostly as the simple back-end to TurboGears and
Django projects, but haven't dug in and made use of its advanced
features (like PL/Python).  I may change my mind, but for now I think
I'll improve the URL database for the Geek Event Aggregator, a piece
of homemade code that mines websites for the event announcement data
they contain (for example, "Dayton Linux SIG meeting on Dec. 18").  I
may try to embed triggers and stored procedures that call out to
Python to do things like validate URLs as they're entered, detect
duplicate URLs pointing to the same site, etc.

-- 
- Catherine
http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/