Re: MySQL refugee interested in pgSQL - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

hi,

There's two things you need to understand to get through the learning curve:

• What's hard to understand is the industry standard 'theory' of SQL.
• Compiling from source or installing from the modules from the Linux based distributions

Both points haven't really so much to do with Postgres as it does with the prerequisite knowledge required of a DBA and systems administration of your OS.

The word "novel" is often confused with "hard". For example, this link
is an article I wrote about installing the procedural language plr and applying it to graphing hits on a firewall. Procedural languages, triggers, rules are what you need to learn about.

Download pgadmin3. It will help you "see" what you are doing (GUI's are good for that).


cheers


Robert Bernier


Jesse Thompson wrote:

Hello, how do you do?

I am a MySQL guy. I am interested in pgSQL. I have learned roughly
everything I know about databases from using MySQL, and all that that
implies. I would like to learn about PG and about "real" relational
database theory. Links to any type of "PGsql for MySQL vets" and/or "Real
relational database theory for MySQL vets" documents would be appreciated.

Due to the hype over the feud, what I fear here of course is that I will
be told that "learning Real DBM requires a Ph.D in DBM", and/or that
"Knowing DBM is an in-born trait, please exit the gene pool immediatly". I
don't suspect that either is the case.

I am also very torn about the feud. I have been using MySQL without
incident for years doing fairly complicated things under load. I want to
know more about the things that ACID pundits appear to hold so dear to
their hearts and MySQL eschews. I really can't fathom most of them yet.
But at the same time I am cut very deep by the animous shown towards MySQL
and it's users on a personal level. It is as if, by entrusting data of any
kind to a MySQL database, I am clubbing baby seals somehow.

I have redrafted this message probably a dozen times now to omit my
instinctive defensiveness of MySQL, my abilities as a DBA, or as a future
DBA. I have come to feel as though being a Real Programmer involves being
a DBA. To write code involves managing data. Managing any volume of data
involves a database, which to the limits of my knowledge would be a
relational SQL database. Quit smirking. SQL is fully non-transparent and
the ability to access data in an SQL database (espescially once you
involve transactions, locking, foreign keys, etc etc) requires full
understanding of all of these. Thus to be a coder one must be a DBA, and
the vitriol directed towards the inadequacies of MySQL directly impunes my
22 years of programming experience and puts me on the defensive.

So perhaps SQL and it's inability to be black-boxed is itself the problem.
>From a Semantic perspecive it sure is ugly, even more so when you leave
the realm of MySQL. I've seen banner ads featuring hybrid cheetah-snails
suggesting this as well.. but I don't know of a viable DBMS alternative (I
didn't click the banner ads) so I'm left in the position where writing
virtually any computer program apparently requires ACID compliant RDBMS
knowledge or else the seals have to die. :(

- - Jesse Thompson
Bend, OR

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