One of MySQL’s key strengths has always been its simplicity to both install, manage and code against, resulting in mass adoption over time, which in turn forced the once web bound database to evolve into a near fully fledged enterprise RDBMS.

PostgreSQL on the other hand was born an RDBMS and instead worked silently in the background improving the performance, reliability and feature list of the world’s most advanced Open Source database, and all under the lesser restrictive BSD license – nice work!.

Getting up to speed with PostgreSQL can take a little longer for MySQL veterans, mostly due to the many subtle differences, but more importantly the extensive feature set (one of the reasons it is taking longer to add PostgreSQL support to dbRecorder ) but the rewards are worth it, as companies such as Skype can attest to.

It was installing OpenNMS several years ago that convinced me to get to grips with PostgreSQL, and although there is a distinct lack of new reading material out there the manual covers everything you need to start building your next web app.

The GUI tool pgAdmin has also come a long way and provides a great interface to PostgreSQL, with excellent instructional prompts and support for all major platforms, there really is no better tool to help you work with PostgreSQL while getting to grips with the vast feature set. Check out the latest beta over at the pgAdmin site.

If you’re not yet excited about PostgreSQL, maybe you should check out the feature list planned for release 8.4 (currently at beta2), with cool features such as Column Level Permissions and SSL Connections you can feel less stressed about the security of your data, oh and the performance improvements won’t hurt either!.

While keeping with the BSD license, another notable release last month was FreeBSD 7.2, a great platform to complement the reliability of PostgreSQL and another way to gain some performance improvements.
Speaking of performance I was pleased to read that Jails are much improved in the latest release, and that it seems I am not the only one that prefers Jails / Zones over VM solutions!.

I’m off to make some progress with PostgreSQLDump.java, the worker class that will allow me to add PostgreSQL support to dbRecorder.
Watch this space…..