[plug] Re: Talk for tonight.

[Bernard Blackham]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:21:01PM +0800, William Kenworthy wrote:
> Good talk.  Learnt some things about postgresl that I never knew - the
> geographical stuff in particular looks neat.  However, I think a
> database should store and retrieve data, being able to query based on
> within/without a circular location is maybe blurring the line a bit too
> much between a database and an application that uses the data and
> probably should be in an overlay.

Perhaps, but then again, the code has already been written once, why
reinvent the wheel? :)

> But when will MySQL support triggers ...

>From http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/ANSI_diff_Triggers.html ...
whenever MySQL 5.1 gets released. MySQL 4.x brought the introduction
of transactions (egads! :) - for a long time, transactions were a
large reason behind using PostgreSQL.

Another less-prominent feature of postgres I didn't mention is it's
journalling (or Write-ahead Logging as they call it). Essentially
means the database will never find itself in a state it can't get
itself out of, should the power go out at an inopportune time -
generally something you'd desire in a database. I haven't looked
into what MySQL has in the way of this though.

The slides will be up sometime tomorrow after I can edit them and
add a little more content (OO on my machine is having issues)
Currently they're fairly meaningless without a narration :)

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham <bernard at blackham dot com dot au>