[plug] SQL question

[Craig Ringer]

> I think people are assuming that the programmers can't program in Perl.

My impresion was that it was suggested, instead, that Perl was a far 
from ideal language to code anything with a GUI in. Or any _application_ 
that needs maintaining, work by teams, etc.

> The bottom line is, that, while Jon said that the front end will be done 
> using VB, no reasoning was given, and, the programmers' capabilities 
> were not mentioned.

Presumably they're using VB because they have the knowledge and tools. 
If they already used, say, Python for other projects that'd probably be 
the assumed language. If you only knew Perl and someone said "why use 
perl, when you can use java" would you say "yay!" or "because I 
_already_ know perl and can save the cost of learning a new language 
this way"?

> We are all making assumptions, in our responses, based on insufficient 
> information.

Yep. For example - why perl? I personally wouldn't reccomend perl to 
anybody intending to do anything
	(a) big
	(b) complex
	(c) involving teamwork
	(d) needing maintainance over time (ie not throwaway)

An equally good question to "why VB not Perl" is "why VB not Python" or 
Java, or C++ ....

We're looking at the _back_ _end_ here. Not the implementation language 
or anything.

Now, as for back ends... well, PostgreSQL is pretty well supported under 
windows (though a linux server might be preferable), supports ODBC so 
you can code to a standard interface, and is fairly standards compliant. 
Stored procedures written for MS-SQL will not work of course... but then 
does anybody know of 2 DBs with compatable stored procs?

MySQL is _not_ reccomended for anybody who is used to working with full 
SQL databases due to lack of support for subselects, transactions, etc. 
Sure, MySQL 4 adds some of this - but it just isn't widely enough 
supported and deployed yet IMHO.

I'd suggest trying to code to ODBC->PostgreSQL if you want an 
alternative DB. Hitting google with "PostgreSQL Microsoft SQL compare" 
or something should give you some interesting comparisons of 
capabilities etc.

I've been using Postgresql for a while w/o problems myself, but I don't 
really do any big db work with it.

Craig Ringer