[Courses] [Postgresql] What is PostgreSQL?

[Julia Christianson]

Michelle M wrote:
> I have two questions for you to send in your answers to the list, if you 
> wish:
> 
> - Give us a brief intro to yourself, and why you are taking this course
> - If you haven't already, think of a concrete project you'd like to use 
> PG with. Share with us a brief synopsis of the project: the problem, the 
> platform, the approach you'll think you'll take, and why you think PG 
> might be a good fit. 

Well, I just discovered this course a couple hours ago so perhaps it's
fitting that I should go first.

I've been playing with computers since 1980, and with Linux since 1998
-- Red Hat flavors almost exclusively.  I work for a non-profit
organization, and we are using postgres for our organizational
databases and billable-hour tracking (custom postgres + PHP); we're
also using it as the database with sql-ledger, the FOSS business
accounting program, which we hope to bring into production by January.
 So I'm pretty familiar with installing and configuring postgres, and
I can use psql but really only with operations that our programmer has
shown me how to do.  I'd like to learn more SQL, and I'm sure I could
stand to learn more about proper administration too.

For a project, the platform would be CentOS 5.0, Postgres 8.x (and
ultimately Apache and PHP).  I might do a database of the company's
computers; I'm currently tracking them in a spreadsheet.  I'd like to
be able to more easily extract various subsets of the data, but it's
really not very relational, so it might be better to pick something
more challenging.  We also need to get our staff database (about 4
tables) into postgres, but that would need to interface with the
existing system and might be too complex.  (Comments welcome.)

-- Julia