Posts Tagged ‘databases’
Features of PostgreSQL
August 8, 2012 | 
Author Database systems can cost lots of money, this is fairly known. Products like Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Standard Edition are also billed per CPU (even per core) and may also require client licenses. The costs and issues of licensing may drive people to free (not only as in beer) software. When free database systems are discussed, most people immediately think about MySQL (also owned by Oracle). But there is another, maybe even better, player in the open source market that is less known. Its name is “PostgreSQL”.
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data. — source: http://www.postgresql.org/about/
This database system is free and very powerful. It supports almost all of the features that the paid (and free) counterparts have. Some of the interesting features are: GIS support, hot standby for high availablity and index-only scans (great for big data). Still not convinced? Check out the impressive Feature Matrix of PostgreSQL yourself. It has excellent support on Linux systems (also OSX and Windows) and integrates well with PHP and the frameworks like Symfony2.
Download & try PostgreSQL (for OSX or Windows) or follow installation instructions (for Ubuntu Linux)
Note: If you want a tool like PHPMyAdmin for PostgreSQL you might consider Adminer.
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Adminer: good alternative for phpMyAdmin
It is not a secret that do a lot of Symfony programming at LeaseWeb. Most of the projects are PHP based and use MySQL as a database. This posts describes a gem that many experienced PHP programmers have not yet heard of.
During software development you often need a tool to quickly search the database, add a column or change a value. Most PHP developers know that phpMyAdmin is a good tool that can provide you with easy access, but only a few know that there is really good alternative for this tool called “Adminer“.
In my opinion Adminer has the advantage that it has a better user experience, but this is not the only advantage it has (or may have). According to the Adminer website there is a long list of reasons why Adminer is better than phpMyAdmin.
If you are really fond of Adminer, you might want to install it in the same way phpMyAdmin is installed. Since it is not yet part of the standard Ubuntu repositories you might want to install it manually. Here are the commands you need for installation (on a Debian based system):
$ sudo su # mkdir /usr/share/adminer # cd /usr/share/adminer # wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php" # ln -s latest.php adminer.php # echo "Alias /adminer.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php" > /etc/apache2/conf.d/adminer.conf # service apache2 restart # exit $
Once it is installed and you want to update it (it wil indicate when a new version is available):
$ sudo su # cd /usr/share/adminer # wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php" # exit $
To uninstall it:
$ sudo su # rm -R /usr/share/adminer # rm /etc/apache2/conf.d/adminer.conf # service apache2 restart # exit $
Try it out and let me know whether you like it or not.