Dean Gibson (DB Administrator) wrote:
...For example, I think phpBB is the only major message board software that supports PostgreSQL (see http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/compare.php ), and in fact has for some time. Of course, they have a DB abstraction layer (wow, what an concept!), which allows them to easily support a number of DBs. Of course, what does that tell you about the level of design and professionalism of phpBB versus the others?...
In most cases it tells me is that the developers are willing to limit themselves to the lowest-common-denominator of features among the supported databases in exchange for the ability to run on a variety of backends. This is a perfectly legitimate decision for products where only basic database features are necessary.
What I find scary is complex products that have been "ported" from something like mySQL to PostgreSQL. This often means that the product has severely limited its use of appropriate PostgreSQL features in order to remain compatible with the other backends.
Cheers, Steve ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
