I'm getting ready to upgrade a live system this weekend. I've had a PostgreSQL
server soaking for a few months and am slowly rolling out the appropriate ODBC
driver, I froze the software versions some while ago so I'm afraid I'm not
running anything "cutting edge" @-)
I notice that while the Insight Win-32 ODBC drivers at around v 7.01.0006
allowed a numeric (dotted-quad) address in the server name field, the current
drivers (8.01.0200) don't: it has to be a symbolic name.
Now I'm sorry if anybody doesn't agree with me, but I believe that on occasion
being able to specify a database server by number is valuable. Whilst it does
make system management slightly more difficult it does remove a point of
failure: particularly when running client software which holds a connection
active for an extended period (e.g. Borland Delphi apps) being unable to resolve
the database server name because the name server is being rebooted (or whatever)
can lead to large-scale failure.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]