Postgres OnLine Journal

As many people who know us know we sit on several camps especially when it comes to databases. The camps we sit on are growing rather than shrinking. While we do have our favorites, we understand that peoples needs and comfort levels are different from ours and we try to take that into consideration when making recommendations to people. The only thing that is generally true about the clientele we consult for is that they fit one of the following features:

• Very minimal bureaucratic structure - this generally rules out most fortune 500 companies and shall we say smaller companies who are too bureaucratic for their own good
• Dot com startups/Niche product developers who are looking to keep costs down to a minimum without too much fuss and are trying to produce a product to change the world
• Small companies who have a relatively low IT budget, but are predominantly windows-based
• Mid-sized companies predominantly windows-based or departments with decent IT staff, who are looking for something their staff can easily maintain rather than simply keeping licensing costs down

It has come up as a topic of discussion, now that SQL Server 2008 is coming out soon and with its new fangled geodetic spatial support, how does this change things?

The short answer is - not much except to increase awareness of spatial databases and to give us more business. As part of our due diligence work we have put together a comparison of the 3 databases spatial functionality - Cross Compare SQL Server 2008 Spatial, PostgreSQL/PostGIS 1.3-1.4, MySQL 5-6 to compliment our Cross Compare of SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL

Programming Design Patterns define recommended approaches of solving common application problems. Within design patterns is a subset of design patterns called Idioms. Idioms you can think of as a strategy for expressing recurring constructs or if you will sub-problems and often take advantage of the special features of a language. They tend to be specific to a programming language and can not be reused in other languages they were not specifically designed for. To demonstrate the differences lets compare two design patterns we commonly use.