[fpc-other] Firebird vs PostgreSQL

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

On 28/10/17 15:00, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:
> On 2017-10-28 13:34, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:> One of the (numerous) 
> things I'm wrestling with at the moment is> PostgreSQL replication...
> Speaking of PostgreSQL, I just realised that tiOPF’s 3-hourly unit test 
> runs don’t include tests against PostgreSQL. I’m busy setting that up now.
> This morning I read through some PostgreSQL documentation, and some of 
> the SQL syntax is pretty nice. I do curse the fact that they too (like 
> Microsoft SQL Server) supports XML field types. I so *hate* the usage of 
> that at work.

XML is something that I've studiously avoided. In general I found a lot 
of commonality between PostgreSQL and Firebird syntax in the couple of 
places I was trying to use them in parallel, but I wasn't trying to do a 
lot of e.g. date arithmetic. Postgres had the edge when it came to 
things like setting up a new user under program control with a specific 
date validity (e.g. good for 24 hours only), and also when trying to 
find out whether a user was already known, what the system was doing 
(e.g. current connection's server process PID) and so on.

Both have notification functions which are important to me, I think I 
had to use the library API on FB to send a message while Postgres could 
do that from SQL (intended to be used as part of a trigger). Postgres's 
documentation was better, with FB I found myself having to use several 
Borland-era PDF manuals.

When I've got my B5500 emulator running I might use SQLite for an 
internal symbol table (basically, to allow the emulator to debug the 
operating system) but I've not got any odd jobs which would allow me to 
run all three databases in parallel.

I've never touched MySQL, since when we had to make a choice it didn't 
have transaction handling and we were planning to put it on a customer 
site... and knowing that they were a big DB2 user the name in itself 
quite simply sounded too tacky to be taken seriously. Obviously 20 years 
on it's got a bit more street cred :-)

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]