What is
Postgresql
, why is it worth using?
Wikipedia, of course, has a great entry on PostgreSQL , which is definitely worth a detailed read.
PostgreSQL is a relational database system that is quite powerful. It has been around for a while, as the wikipedia article talks about.
PostgreSQL is ACID compliant , and has been that way long before MySQL was. ACID compliance means that a database makes sure that transactions occur reliably. This includes:
Atomicity - the database system will do all of the tasks in a transaction, or none of them
Consistency - integrity constraints are kept
Isolation - tasks outside a transaction can never see data in an intermediate state
Durability - once a transaction is complete, it persists.
PostgreSQL has lots of interesting and useful features, which we'll talk about.
I chose PG years ago because it was a more robust, secure, and feature rich DBMS system at the time I was evaluating it in comparison to MySQL. MySQL has definitely caught up. But I'm still partial to PG.
Lots of open source CMS and other systems support PG.
PG is cross-platform. We'll focus on installing and using it in Linux (we are, after all, Linuxchix), but next week, I will give some details about how to install it on other platforms.
Wikipedia, of course, has a great entry on PostgreSQL , which is definitely worth a detailed read.
PostgreSQL is a relational database system that is quite powerful. It has been around for a while, as the wikipedia article talks about.
PostgreSQL is ACID compliant , and has been that way long before MySQL was. ACID compliance means that a database makes sure that transactions occur reliably. This includes:
Atomicity - the database system will do all of the tasks in a transaction, or none of them
Consistency - integrity constraints are kept
Isolation - tasks outside a transaction can never see data in an intermediate state
Durability - once a transaction is complete, it persists.
PostgreSQL has lots of interesting and useful features, which we'll talk about.
I chose PG years ago because it was a more robust, secure, and feature rich DBMS system at the time I was evaluating it in comparison to MySQL. MySQL has definitely caught up. But I'm still partial to PG.
Lots of open source CMS and other systems support PG.
PG is cross-platform. We'll focus on installing and using it in Linux (we are, after all, Linuxchix), but next week, I will give some details about how to install it on other platforms.