Interview with Josh Berkus of PostgreSQL

SilentBob4 writes "The PostgreSQL database project has recently released Version 8.0, which was received with quite some fanfare, mostly due to its first-ever Windows port. Mad Penguin talked with Josh Berkus, one of the core team members, to find out how 8.0 has fared since its official release on January 17, 2005. Full interview."

Fatal Flaws

[Red Pointy Tail]

There are fatal flaws in this version of 8.0 that makes it practically unusable in Win32 for me.

Firstly, the broken Unicode support, which arose because certain collation functions doesn't work well on UTF-8 (PostGre uses UTF-8, Win32 prefers UCS-2). The tone you get from reading the bug/support forums are disdainful, pointing the problem to Win32 libraries and suggesting that it should not be in the confines of the PostGres team to fix Windows bugs. Nevertheless, if they already put so much effort to porting to Win32, it seems strange that they are adopting such a stance instead of proactively trying to fix that problem.

Secondly, there is no support for the Win1252 code page, which is very commonly used in English Windows, while mind-bogglingly, there seem to be all other code-pages from Cyrillic to Arabic. This makes migration of data from SQL Server very difficult, and using Latin-1 doesn't help when it encounters characters like `. Yes, Windows should be whacked on the bottom for introducing such shitty incompatibilities but that doesn't solve the problem. The other solution to this problem - to convert to UTF-8 instead - is unavailable because of first problem.

I have been trying to persuade my company to shift from SQL Server to PostGreSQL on Windows (for some reasons, we cannot move over to Linux yet). But after hitting these brick walls - I've giving up. Here's to hoping!

Kudos to Josh and the PostgreSQL team!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to use this opportunity to say this: Kudos to Josh Berkus and the entire PostgreSQL team! I hope you are reading this. You have done an absolutely amazing job with your database. It is the only Free Software RDBMS that I believe can be compared with Oracle. This is hardly the first Free Software RDBMS I used but it is the first one that actually works as it should, respecting standards and relational model with full ACID support (*cough*cough* [sql-info.de]). This is also the fastest Free Software database when you are doing any serious inserts/updates-heavy transactions on large data sets with consistency being the top priority. Kudos! You guys rule! I believe that your project should be a de facto standard in Free Software world. Keep up the good work.

There is a buzz around

[WebHostingGuy]

I have seen that there seems to be a buzz around Postgresql over the last few months. More and more people are requesting Postgresql in web hosting. It seems that this is not a substitution for MS SQL but people are migrating from MySQL to Postgresql for one reason or another. Granted this is just one perspective from a web host and not scientifically significant.