[development] So why we do support postgresql?

[Jean-Michel Pouré]

On lun, 2008-01-21 at 13:02 -0500, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> That is all good, but how is that related to the issue at hand? We
> have
> a problem as it is with development and testing resources for
> PostgreSQL, 
> so your solution is to make everyone use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL
> to solve that problem?

I am not arguying that you should drop MySQL support.

Not everyone should use PostgreSQL, only Drupal main hackers.
Users will certainly continue to use MySQL.

I am only arguying that if you were developing Drupal
on PostgreSQL, it would solve the portability issue.

This is not a joke.

Same goes for translation. Let's suppose that you are writing a book in
an old 500 year BC language, written in stange glyphs. Okay? You will
have to translate the book into English and then translate the English
book into other languages. Non-standand source => English => Other
languages.

Now, suppose that you write the same book directly in English. You can
translate it to all languages. English is probably the easiest language
in the world.

Sames goes for SQL99, it is easy and very pure. You can nearly smoothly
run ANY SQL99 syntax in MySQL. But the converse is not true. 

DB2 and Oracle are completely SQL 99 compliant. If you run a PostgreSQL
syntax under DB2 and Oracle, it goes like a charm.

To recall the story of the book :
Write a standard SQL99 => Run everywhere on all other databases
including MySQL.

Thus, we can safely assume that if you were using the SQL99 standard
implementation (namely PostgreSQL), it would solve your portability
issues.

Last example, look at your database types. I don't remember how many
database types you are using in the abstraction layer. In SQL99, there
are not that many types. From memory, I recall int4, int8, boolean (or
bit), monetary, blob (texte), etc ... Focusing on this small list of
types makes it easier to port to other database systems.

Same for everything else. 

Kind regards,
Jean-Michel