Postgresql for Yoga's Data Store

Yoga needs a Data Store

Yoga is a GPL version of Notes. One of the parts of the project is to
use a data store, and they have decided to go with Sleepycat Berkeley
DB. Yoga is still in the designing phase, so now is the best time to
respond to their thoughts on Postgresql. For example, I know the
documentation has really improved. Some people don't know how far
Postgresql has advanced.

This came from the original plan for Yoga (formally known as gnuotes).
The document can be found at
http://samba.anu.edu.au/yoga/documentation/original/docs/gnuotes.htm

Product Comparison

There is a reasonable hole in the FSF/GNU product suite when it comes to
good database products. The perfect database back end
for the data store would of been Solid SQL from Solid Technologies
(http://www.solid.fi). Unfortunately this is a commercial product
which is not free for free software projects. Several other products where
looked at however.

Postgresql is probably the most mature and stable of the FSF/GNU database
product line, but it suffers from a few drawbacks. In
particular is has no automatic recovery, administrator intervention is
always required. [check status of transaction management and
logging]. Documentation is sparse to non existent.

Beagle and GNU SQL are only about 60% and 70% complete respectfully.
Neither is ready for prime time, although their status may
change considerably over the course of this project.

Sleepycat Berkeley DB is a commercial product, which is however, free for
open source developers. It comes complete with source
code. It offers both roll forward and roll back error recovery, as well as
support for locking and transactions. Future versions will
support multiple indexes per database (can be faked for now) as well as
inclusion in the glibc distributions. It is however very much
of a "roll your own" database product.



Let me know what your feedback is, and I can pass it on to the Yoga
team. I think Postgresql and Yoga could make a great team.

Oliver