Re: [GENERAL] Table names case sensitive? - Mailing list pgsql-general

We have started porting our application suite away from Interbase and over
to PostgreSQL.  Our main concern with Interbase was not money, but the
inconvenience of dealing with user licenses.  A great deal of our database
interaction is machine to machine and does not fit the standard model of
users.

Porting our customers' data was fairly easy once we understood why the
initial attempts were failing.  To facilitate the conversion, we created a
temporary modification to the PostgreSQL back end which strips out the
problem quotes.  Then the conversion using Borland's data pump ran like a
champ.  Ok - it isn't fast, but speed is not an issue for us.  Rather, we
want to be able to convert data with the least amount of [human] effort.
Our plan is to keep using Interbase until all of our applications are
ported, grabbing updates periodically. Finally, we will do a last
conversion and shut down Interbase - and kiss irritating license files
good-bye forever.

Converting our Win32 front end (built with BCB4 C/S) from IB to PG only
took a couple of days.  We snapped the PG ODBC driver in place on the NT
box, fired up the Linux/PG postmaster with -d 3 and then corrected minor
incompatibilities as they popped up.

From the little experience we have with PG so far, it looks damn good.
Gone are the black-box GUIs of windows, to be replaced with super cool psql
- which we love (far more than isql).  The PG man pages and on-line help
are also fantastic.

We are looking forward to the day when we can pull the plug from our last
Windows machine and the repercussions of our terrible decision to trust NT
will finally come to and end.  As a digression - I will never, ever forget
the disbelief on our programmers faces when they realized that the
Microsoft "flagship server" we had just committed to (NT) really did not
include the basic services such as telnetd, nfsd, or UUCP.  What a joke.

I just wish PostgreSQL had foreign keys (referential integ) - oh well, real
soon now!

Steve


PS What sort of problems did you have with IB - we only had one (growing
log files) and have a solution to that.  From every other respect IB has
served us well.  In fact, if Interbase hadn't broken user SuSE 6.2, we may
have stuck with it.


David Warnock wrote:

> Stephen,
>
> Interesting that you are converting from Interbase. We have now reached
> the point where we only use 2 commercial pieces of software. Interbase
> and Visual SlickEdit. I would like to drop Interbase but currently we
> ship quite a few single user systems running on Win 9x.
>
> We have very good experience so far with Postgresql on internal
> projects. We use MySql too but only on systems that are pretty much read
> only.
>
> My goal is to migrate onto Postgresql as our only dbms, the developments
> over the last year or so have been great and I fully expect to achieve
> my goal in the next year or so. As the customers for our product that
> uses Interbase are charities we think that Linux and Postgresql (plus
> Apache and Jserv later Jakarta) make a great fit.
>
> For our importing we have found that is is sooo much faster to dump the
> data into the native format that the postgresql copy expects and then do
> the load on the server.
>
> By dumping a table at a time in the text format (new line for each row,
> tab between columns, \N for null, \\ for \, and \tab for tab) from your
> old system you can be loading in one table while dumping the next. We
> have found that copy loads the data soo much faster then anything else
> that this is definately worthwhile.
>
> Fortunately this text format is common to mysql and postgresql. On mysql
> for example we had an import that used a java program and prepared
> statements.  It took several days to do the import. Using the copy
> method we got this down to a few hours.
>
> We had chosen interbase for 5 reasons
>
> - excellent jdbc support (but the postgresql jdbc support is also
> excellent)
> - support for unicode (but postgresql can now do this although we have
> not yet tried it)
> - multi-generational engine (postgresql has this since v6.5)
> - platform support - Linux, NT, Win 9x and netware (in fact netware is
> no longer really a requirement and so win9x is our only problem and I
> expect that we will persuade many off that in the next couple of years)
> - pricing for VAR's, interbase is good value (postgresql can't be beat
> though :-)
>
> We have recently had a few problems with Interbase on Linux so the
> pressure is on them (and they are defiantely not moving ahead as fast as
> postgresql is, all the recent versions have been very late and some big
> bugs have been left in the field for a long time).
>
> Dave