Stephen,
Interesting that you are converting from Interbase. We have now reached
the point where we only use 2 commercial pieces of software. Interbase
and Visual SlickEdit. I would like to drop Interbase but currently we
ship quite a few single user systems running on Win 9x.
We have very good experience so far with Postgresql on internal
projects. We use MySql too but only on systems that are pretty much read
only.
My goal is to migrate onto Postgresql as our only dbms, the developments
over the last year or so have been great and I fully expect to achieve
my goal in the next year or so. As the customers for our product that
uses Interbase are charities we think that Linux and Postgresql (plus
Apache and Jserv later Jakarta) make a great fit.
For our importing we have found that is is sooo much faster to dump the
data into the native format that the postgresql copy expects and then do
the load on the server.
By dumping a table at a time in the text format (new line for each row,
tab between columns, \N for null, \\ for \, and \tab for tab) from your
old system you can be loading in one table while dumping the next. We
have found that copy loads the data soo much faster then anything else
that this is definately worthwhile.
Fortunately this text format is common to mysql and postgresql. On mysql
for example we had an import that used a java program and prepared
statements. It took several days to do the import. Using the copy
method we got this down to a few hours.
We had chosen interbase for 5 reasons
- excellent jdbc support (but the postgresql jdbc support is also
excellent)
- support for unicode (but postgresql can now do this although we have
not yet tried it)
- multi-generational engine (postgresql has this since v6.5)
- platform support - Linux, NT, Win 9x and netware (in fact netware is
no longer really a requirement and so win9x is our only problem and I
expect that we will persuade many off that in the next couple of years)
- pricing for VAR's, interbase is good value (postgresql can't be beat
though :-)
We have recently had a few problems with Interbase on Linux so the
pressure is on them (and they are defiantely not moving ahead as fast as
postgresql is, all the recent versions have been very late and some big
bugs have been left in the field for a long time).
Dave