[CLUE-Tech] PostgreSQL News

[Grant Johnson]

As some of you may know, my open source database of choice is 
Postgres.  Before everyone goes off on a MySQL rant, let me tell you that I 
chose it for transactional support (rollbacks) and the ability to use 
cursors.  MySQL is not bad, it just does not support all that I want.

Neither does Postgres, but it is closer.  Most noteable, it does not 
support outer joins.  This is really annoying, but you can program around 
it, and make your software do the join pretty easily by just doing another 
select.

Here is the news:  As of version 7.1, currently in beta, Postgres will 
support outer joins.  Yeah!!!!!

There is now only one reason to use any of the proprietary databases, 
transaction logging, so you can recover things since the last 
backup.  However, with Postgres you can do hot backups with data 
consistency, since it uses a concurrency model that uses a snapshot of the 
database when the transaction started.  This means that if you don't mind 
the load on the server, you could run constant backups, starting each 
immediately when the prior one finishes.  That could be cool.