Database Administration, Reporting, and Light application development

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:54:00 -0400

One of the most common questions people ask is Which tools work with PostgreSQL. In a sense the measure of a database's maturity/popularity are the number of vendors willing to produce management and development tools for it. Luckily there are a lot of vendors producing tools for PostgreSQL and the list is growing. One set of tools people are interested in are Database administration, ER diagramming, Query tools, and quickie application generators (RAD).

For this issue of our product showcase, we will not talk about one product, but several that fit in the aforementioned category. All the listed products work with PostgreSQL and can be used for database administration and/or architecting or provide some sort of light reporting/rapid application building suite. By light reporting/application building, we mean a tool with a simple wizard that a novice can use to build somewhat functional applications in minutes or days. This rules out all-purpose development things like raw PHP, .NET, Visual Studio, database drivers etc. Things we consider in this realm are things like OpenOffice Base and MS Access. Most of these tools are either free or have 30-day try before you buy options.

You can't really say one tool is absolutely better than another since each has its own strengths and caters to slightly different audiences and also you may like the way one tool does one important thing really well, though it may be mediocre in other respects. We also left out a lot of products we are not familiar with and may have gotten some things wrong.

If we left out your favorite product and you feel it meets these criteria, or you feel we made any errors, please let us know, and we'll add or correct it. We will be including Free open source as well as proprietary products in this mix. If we left out what you consider an important criteria, please let us know and we'll try to squeeze it in somewhere.

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GDAL OGR2OGR for Data Loading

nospam@example.com (Leo Hsu and Regina Obe) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:42:00 -0500

What is FWTools and OGR GDAL?

FWTools GIS Toolkit is a freely available open source toolkit for Windows and Linux that can do more than GIS tricks. It is a precompiled bundle of Open Source GIS tools. The FW comes from the initials of Frank Warmerdam, the originator of the toolkit and current President of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO).

One key component of the GIS Toolkit is the GDAL/OGR library. Parts of the library have been enhanced by several in the OSGEO community. GDAL is a basic foundation of countless Open source GIS as well as commercial GIS applications. Here are Listings of commercial and open source software that use it and GDAL sponsors.

This is a library which historically has been developed and maintained by Frank Warmerdam, but has started to garner quite a few developers. GDAL is X/MIT licensed (similar to BSD license), therefore the licensing is very generous for commercial use. The toolkit can be downloaded from http://fwtools.maptools.org/

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Postgres OnLine Journal - Dbase

Database Administration, Reporting, and Light application development

GDAL OGR2OGR for Data Loading

What is FWTools and OGR GDAL?