Re: advocacy: drupal and PostgreSQL

On Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:03:43 -0500
Tom Hart <tomhart@coopfed.org> wrote:

> Let me just sneak in a quick rant here, from somebody who really
> doesn't matter.
>
> We run drupal for our corporate intranet (currently being built)
> and we use postgreSQL as the backend. Some of the modules and
> things don't work perfectly, but drupal supported it and that made
> me happy enough to work with it. Now after reading this garbage,

Same here.

> I'm extremely disappointed. Completely dropping postgresql
> capability might not affect them too largely in the huge run,
> because a large amount of their user base is using mySQL, but it
> would send a message to those of us that believe in choice. I'm
> afraid that they're choosing the route of convenience over their
> users, and every time I think about it I want to go looking for
> replacements.

Same here.

I think Postgres is a great DB... but what upset me most is:
- missing freedom
- missing freedom

I'd explain better the 2 above point and add a 3rd one later.
- If you've just one choice it is nice it is Open, but having a
"competitor" is better
- once you go for one DB it will be extremely painful to go back and
the overall design of such a beast will suffer a lot

3rd point:
- going MySQL only may be OK for Joomla. Not for Drupal.
Drupal is halfway between a CMS and a framework. You can use to do
more than just showing semi-static pages. You can use it to deal with
money where transaction and ref. integrity is important and from the
point of view of a developer it is not yet a "comoditised" software.
Client are asking more than just install it on a hosting.

I've seen some of the problems Drupal has with Postgres and quite a
bunch are caused by absolutely unnecessary Mysqlisms.
Then when there are patches that require to fix badly written SQL
spread around people complain pg is holding the world back.

There are very smart developer some of whom (Larry Garfield, Edison
Wong) are actually going in the right direction without complaining
every now and then that pg is holding drupal back and drupal I think
is still the leader of a marketplace no body is in.
Joshua posted the link to Edison's project that can support pg, MS
SQL, Oracle, DB2(?)... but well I had the feeling that Edison is a bit
ostracised. While I wouldn't define his work a DB AL... well it works
so kudos!
Unfortunately 6.X should be out soon and his work won't be included
and it looks that 7.X infrastructure will be even better.

Maybe some people hope to get rich fast enough they won't have to
work with any other DB other than MySQL...

> postgres or not. If drupal 6 absolutely doesn't support postgres,

Thanks to schema api drupal 6 should support pg even better. But it is
half the work since the DB abstraction layer... is not abstract.
Substantially queries are passed to db_query as strings and "adapted"
with regexp.
Schema api uses array to define tables so you don't have to
serialise, unserialise, serialise queries and you have some metadata.
But... but... an DB abstraction layer is complicated and doesn't come
for free. Actually some people complain about the overhead of a DB AL
but then write awful SQL...
Anyway... well maybe adopting a full fledged ORM for 7.0 will
actually be too much... and writing one may take advantage of the
knowledge of underlying objects... but still be too much to be
written for 7.

> then I'm dropping my drupal 5 install on the spot. This is a cold
> move drupal, and you should be ashamed.

No... I just posted here so more people would be aware of the problem
and help correct it. I don't think drupal is really going to become
mono-db. It seems that even MS had some interest in porting drupal to
MS SQL... and there is actually a MS employee doing so...

Just I'd like it to be done better and faster and avoid to read the
same thing on drupal ML every 20 days or so ;)

> BTW, I'm a PHP developer who uses postgreSQL almost exclusively and
> I'm on this list as well as other postgres lists constantly (even
> if as a reader most of the time). If they have this big of an
> issue, why not ask for help?

Because some won't have any more excuse to write MySQLish SQL ;)
I think that people that use drupal on Postgres could get a bit more
involved in drupal all the project will gain *a lot* and not just
because of improved pg support but because pg people generally are
better DB guys knowing more than one DB and conscious of what a DB
can do and it is done for.


I know that what I'm writing worth nearly 0, but I'm terribly busy
(guess what...) with building up a module for drupal that will run
just on pg (sorry... I'm not going to put money in something that
discovered transactions just yesterday no matter how fast it is to
serve thousands semi-static pages and if I can find it even on South
Pole hosting, If I had to serve thousands static pages I'd consider
MySQL, really, but I'm not).

As soon as I wake up from this deadline nightmare I'll definitively
try to review and propose patches to offer a better support for pg
and I'm very interested in the DB AL for 7.

And no... it is not just Karoly but there are a couple of core dev
too that are a bit pissed off about how hard is to support more than 1
DB.

--
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it