[development] So why we do support postgresql?

[Rafael Martinez]

Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
>> 'The minority' is something I am hearing all the time. Do we have
>> numbers that can give us any statistics about the amount of systems
>> using drupal and postgresql? Because I suspect that they are not as few
>> as some would like them to be.
>>
> 
> This is what we have. You can see it is quite a minority.
> 
> http://groups.drupal.org/node/6164
> 
> Even if the above data was not available, and PostgreSQL is a majority, it
> it is still a moot point.
> 
> Every year, we have a new maintainer, then he disappears. I don't think we
> even have one at present.
> 
> The fact that it is a challenge to get people to test and push PostgreSQL
> patches
> through the patch queue is the big hindrance.


Well, if we could say that the data in this page "What DB drives your 
Drupal?" is representative, a 11% of the users is a minority, but we are 
talking about around 66.000 (11% of 600.000 downloads) websites if the 
data in http://buytaert.net/tag/statistics is also representative.

You don't know neither what kind of users are these 60.000. Are they 
running large, corporate or intratet sites or small local websites at 
home? I have the feeling that we are not talking about small systems here.

My point is that I think that stopping supporting postgresql is a bad, 
bad idea and it would get many supporters/users upset.

You already have a database abstraction layer. The only problem here is 
the different SQL statements send to the database. More use of standard 
SQL insteed of MySQL specific statements will help to minimize the 
differents between the two databases regarding the code. We could even 
use other ways of interacting with the database, like stored procedures, 
but this is another discussion.

I am also sure that many postgresql DBAs will help with this issue if it 
gets easier to do this. For example, I do not have time to learn the 
internals of Drupal's code (I am a DBA), but it will be a pleasure to 
help if I could get a list with all SQL statements send to the database 
and a test-case database with test data. It would take us very little 
time to find out and fix specific MySQL SQL statements that will have 
problems running on postgresql.


My 5 cents ..... Let's make a great product like Drupal even better 
insteed of destroying his good reputation.

regards
-- 
  Rafael Martinez, <r.m.guerrero at usit.uio.no>
  Center for Information Technology Services
  University of Oslo, Norway

  PGP Public Key: http://folk.uio.no/rafael/