Hi all,

I am adressing this email to this mailinglist due to the lack of some
address to post euphoric feedback to. Let me tell you my story:

This february I began working on a web-application using PHP and a
SQL-Database. My problem was to evaluate the right one:

Interbase was at the state of being developed then. There were only promises
to make open source of it. They did not really fulfill them.

Postgres (version 6.5) was known to be quite slow and unstable.

So I used MySQL and was quite happy with it; possibly because I didn't
really know all the features and possibilities of true SQL (not just that
crappy subset MySQL gives its users). Last September I deceided to get a
REAL database and I began looking araound a bit (I desperately needed UNIONs
and this stinking workaround with temp. TABLEs MySQL provides you with was
not really an alternative). I deeply looked at Postgres (I think 7.0.2 or
7.0.3) and deceided to give it a try.

And it was great: There is nothing you cannot do with it. My only problem:
The limitation of the row-size and the VACUUM-stuff.

After having read the article on Postgres at phpbuilder.com, I deceided to
use the current CVS-version. And this let me fully fall in love with your
database... What impressed me most: You seem to know all my thinkings: One
day, I needed a LIMIT within one subselect of a UNION. It did not work
(Although I used the brackets and there was no Syntax-Error; the query
simply did not return any rows). One day and a "cvs update" later, the
feature was implemented.

Another example: Jody, the guy that writes a searchengine for our database,
needed UNIONs in subselects. Somwhere on your homepage one can read about
this being implemented in PostgreSQL 7.2 but he just forwarded me a mail
from one of you that this feature acutally is implemented in 7.1dev.

And you cannot imagine the fun I had with compiling perl into the database
and with writing the stored-procedure to do a string-manipulation. 

If only I had time to have a closer look at the PostgreSQL-Code: I would
spend my whole free time for helping you to make postgres even better.

Many thanks to you. You did and are doing a great job. Postgres is the best
OpenSource-Database out there (and better than many commercional products
(that ability to use Perl as language for stored procedures is uniqe)).

Thanks.

Pilif

Thu, 14 Dec 2000 11:42:11 +0100
Philip Hofstetter <philip@linktrail.com>
Thanks!