[development] So why we do support postgresql?

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On Jan 20, 2008 8:02 AM, Rafael Martinez <r.m.guerrero at usit.uio.no> wrote:
> 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.

As Khalid said - number of users is not as important as willingness
and speed to patch/review issues.

> 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.

If they are all big businesses, all the more reason for them to have
budget and time available to patch/review issues.

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

Nobody suggested that.  People suggested committing patches for
PostgreSQL if they are reasonably certain to work and holding back the
rest of development.

> 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.

Great!  The problem isn't so much existing queries, but more queries
that are being debated to add.  You can see a list of issues like that
here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/6980

I suggest you join that group as well if you haven't.  In order to
test them you'd need to maintain a Drupal-HEAD installation on a
PostgreSQL backend.

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

Well, we're all trying to "make Drupal better," but we have different
ideas about how to do that.

Thanks,
Greg

-- 
Greg Knaddison
Denver, CO | http://knaddison.com
World Spanish Tour | http://wanderlusting.org/user/greg