[Courses] [Postgresql] What is PostgreSQL?

[Conor Daly]

On Mon, Nov 19, 2007 at 09:26:11PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Michelle M thought:
> 
> - Give us a brief intro to yourself, and why you are taking this course

Hi, I'm Conor.  I have responsibility for the Irish national archive of
climate data which currently lives in an Ingres database
(http://www.ingres.com).  Ingres is a pretty much mature enterprise
database which is now available under the GPL.  If I'm not mistaken,
ingres and postgres share a common ancestry back in the distant past.

Our database is pretty huge and we interact with it with a mixture of
interactive sql, php and cgi web scripts and embedded C and FORTRAN
programs.

I have quite a few years experience with some areas of ingres but I want
to see what I'm missing and where the similarities and differences lie.

I have good embedded programming skills and a fairly good focus on 'edge
case' programming and I'd like to share those if I can.  I am also pretty
paranoid about having proper, working backups both because this is the
official archive and because we have had to (successfully I might add) go
to our backups on occasion.

> - 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. It should be something that will be fun, and 
> perhaps a bit challenging for you.

I have a number of old cars (Saab 900 1990 - 1993) that I drive on a daily
basis.  At that age, there is often maintenance work to do and it's hard
to keep track in my head.  I want to make a maintenance and repair
database for these cars.  I already have something of a design in MySql
but I'd like to take it further.  

Platform is CentOS 4 on my home server and I'll aim for a web interface
using php ('cos I know some php already).

I would think PG is a bit of overkill for this task as it is a fairly
small database and I would be the only user.  There wouldn't be automatic
(or even frequent) transactions to cause problems for backups.

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at cod.homelinux.org>
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