Re: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories - Mailing list pgsql-announce

Tom,

  This is excellent, in fact I wish more ppl would express their success
in so much detail. Thank  you.

      Cheers,
         Jeff MacDonald

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Thomas Good wrote:

> > From: Jeff MacDonald <jeff@hub.org>
> > Reply-To: Jeff MacDonald <info@pgsql.com>
> > To: pgsql-announce@postgresql.org
> > Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories
> >
> > Greetings All,
> >
> >      Do you use PostgreSQL ?
> >      Do you love it ?
> >      Do you want the world to know ?
>
> Jeff - will this suffice?  If it is too terse I can flesh it out abit.  ;-)
> Social Workers are notoriously verbose...thank God for the text data type!
>
>
>         North Richmond Community Mental Health Center
>         ---------------------------------------------
>
> is the Department of Psychiatry at the Sisters of Charity Medical Center,
> located in Staten Island, New York.  We are a large department spanning
> two campuses (St. Vincent's Campus, formerly St. Vincent's Medical Center
> - and - Bayley Seton Campus - Formerly Bayley Seton Hospital.)
>
> We provide a full continuum of care for the mentally ill and chemically
> addicted persons of Staten Island.  This includes emergency psychiatry
> (our Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program [ CPEP ]), inpatient
> psychiatry for adults and adolescents, outpatient services, residential
> services (housing for our clients with full case management services as
> well as vocational opportunities and training), ambulatory services
> (`day program' services), chemical and alcohol detoxification services,
> alcohol and addiction ambulatory programs, a mobile crisis unit and
> numerous other services all available to the people of Staten Island.
>
> The department of Residential Services currently has a PROGRESS database
> which provides clinical charting capabilities and administrative
> functionality.  This database is being ported to PostgreSQL.  We expect
> to go live 01 July 1999.
>
> The Psych Research dept had a FoxPro database that tracked every patient
> ever served at our facility - this was online 1986 - 1999.
> In the past year we have migrated the FoxPro database to PostgreSQL 6.3.2.
> It has been online for 9 months and has been very reliable.
>
> Deployment followed a 6 month process of evaluating other vendors.  Sybase,
> Oracle, mSQL and mySQL were all evaluated as was Empress.  The conclusion
> reached was that Oracle was the best commercial database available and
> that PostgreSQL was clearly the finest open source database on the market.
> In comparison shopping I was the primary person testing both Oracle and
> Postgres and found that Postgres compared favourably to Oracle.  The
> psql interface is very similar to SQL*Plus in functionality and Postgres
> offers a comparable number of built in functions.  Although Oracle possesses
> some nice features not available in Postgres (for example the nvl() function)
> we opted to go with Postgres for three reasons.
>
> 1)  Compliance with ANSI standards:  Oracle seems to lag way behind here.
> 2)  Tech support offered by the Postgres mailing lists is superior to
>     any tech support I've encountered, contracted or otherwise.
> 3)  The Open Source aspect of Postgres.  Although we have little cause
>     to tinker with internals my shop is committed to Open Source.  In as
>     much as we are publicly funded we feel it is our mandate to keep
>     our code in the public domain and to use open source code whenever
>     possible.
>
> At the same time our shop began migrating away from proprietary databases
> we began the process of moving away from proprietary Unix.  UnixWare is
> being phased out in favour of Slackware Linux and FreeBSD.  However, it has
> been necessary to install PostgreSQL on UnixWare as an interim measure.
> In historical terms UnixWare has been something of a white elephant and
> consequently has a counter-intuitive feel to it.  It was necessary to ask
> for some technical support from Bruce Momjian, a postgres developer with
> System V expertise, to get postgres installed on UnixWare.  I'm pleased
> to report that the support was forthcoming and invaluable.  Submitting the
> same query to PROGRESS and Postgres on the UnixWare machine is a nice way
> to demonstrate another feature of Postgres - the backend is relatively
> quick.  At least by comparison with a proprietary database.
>
> At this point NR CMHC has PostgreSQL running and running well on UnixWare,
> FreeBSD and Linux.  In mission critical mode.
>
> Finally, our PROGRESS database offers a 4GL that is supposed to make writing
> code easier for someone like myself:  I am not a `REAL PROGRAMMER.'  All of
> my formal training has been in psychiatry and social work.  However, as a
> Unix-SQL-Perl ENTHUSIAST, I was assigned the task of running our network
> and the agency databases a few years ago.  Thanks to the efforts of Edmund
> Mergl who wrote and maintains the marvelous DBD::Pg module that allows me to
> use Perl (via Tim Bunce's DBI module) I have found a viable replacement for
> the PROGRESS 4GL.  Thus I've been able to step in, port existing PROGRESS
> code and move our applications and data to what I feel is the best SQL
> database available.
>
> North Richmond CMHC is currently integrating all of our databases (we have
> 4 postgres and one PROGRESS) into an inter-unit repository of patient data.
> This is an ambitious project, however, PostgreSQL is the tool that is making
> it possible.  We invite inquiries on the process of migration to the
> best, most advanced (an example - support for arrays) open source database
> available.
>
> Thomas Good, MIS Coordinator, North Richmond CMHC
> Member: Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility
> tomg@ { admin | q8 } .nrnet.org
> Phone: 718-354-5528
> Fax:   718-354-5056
>

=========================================================================
Jeff MacDonald           // Hub.org Networking Services // PostgreSQL INC
jeff@hub.org            // sales@hub.org               // sales@pgsql.com
http://hub.org/~jeff   // http://hub.org              // http://pgsql.com
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