A Quick Look At PostgreSQL

The advanced features, open source code, and BSD licensing terms should have more people talking about the PostgreSQL database these days. Like a number of rock bands, powerful features in its product that developers may wish to consider. ACID compliant, includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, and can support storage of multimedia objects. With the growth of broadband adoption in the US and the world, that could be an important consideration for web application developers. advantages of working with the PL/pgSQL language: (With SQL) every SQL statement must be executed individually by the database server. That means that your client application must send each query to the database server, wait for it to be processed, receive the results, do some computation, then send other queries to the server. All this incurs interprocess communication and may also incur network overhead if your client is on a different machine than the database server. With PL/pgSQL you can group a block of computation and a series of queries inside the database server, thus having the power of a procedural language and the ease of use of SQL, but saving lots of time because you don't have the whole client/server communication overhead. This can make for a considerable performance increase. Some developers, particularly ones in a corporate environment, may favor PostgreSQL's BSD licensing over MySQL's GPL terms. (Please note that MySQL does offer commercial licenses for sale through MySQL AG). BSD licensed code can be taken and incorporated into non-open source projects, and presents a more business-friendly approach. Tag: Add to DiggThis | Furl Bookmark Murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.