Gidley Gossipings

20 Sep, 2004

I really wanted to see Postgres on Windows - to my mind this is one of the most important developments in Open Source databases for a long time.

Postgres has sat on Linux being declared superior to MySQL for years and now finally they have released a beta windows installer. In short it now does work on Windows. On 2 of my PC's it works ok - on someone elses however it will not work at all for no obvious reason. It does seen to be ok - it is more reliable than the copy of Oracle on my laptop (though that is not saying much).

The only obvious windows glitch is with the service handler - if you reboot without letting the service stop it leaves a PID file that stop the service starting - not too good - but easy to fix. In short I think it is good enough now to develop against and should make it far easier for me to look at using it as the database for a project - as we can now develop against it easily.

I am very impressed with PGAccess 3 as it is just what I want from a DB tool (Oracle - I don't want a web enabled enterprise manager that uses 500mb of ram just to startup). It is lightweight and works and does not cause problems with the system.