About Databases...

[Leif B. Kristensen]

Peter A. Schott wrote:

> PostGreSQL - good feature set, open source.  Not sure on speed, but it
> should run natively on Unix, Linux, and Win32 (not sure about BSD or
> others).

A lot of the core developers of PostgreSQL are apparently running *BSD.
On the PostgreSQL-General mailing list, I've noted that people run it
on Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and all kinds of 'nixes. I think that the
keyword is POSIX compliance.

The native Win32 version (8.x) is very recent, and probably not a good
bet for a production environment for the time being. Earlier versions
may be run under Cygwin.

The "speed" of a database engine is notoriously hard to assess by
objective means. It will depend on tuning, indexing, load, read/write
ratio, number of concurrent users, and a lot of other variables. Some
RDBMSs also performs terribly in situations where others shine.

Anyway, I'd recommend a closer study of PostgreSQL for anyone interested
in a good RDBMS. I have been using MySQL for several years, but have
recently come to appreciate all the advanced features of PostgreSQL
that still is kind of "vaporware" in MySQL.
-- 
Leif Biberg Kristensen
just another global village idiot