[Server-devel] Database on server

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 2:47 PM, John Watlington <wad at laptop.org> wrote:
>  You are correct that postgres is in the build, but nothing
>  currently requires it.   The idmgr package is using sqlite instead.
>
>  Martin can either make this call or lead further discussion.

I have certainly been mulling on this -- I have experience with both,
and my intention is to define a simple, but effective set of criteria
and see which DB meets it best. The key webapps we care about support
both (I did the support of the Pg port for a while for Moodle),
support for Pg is growing and SQL syntax is converging. So support in
webapps we care about is no longer the monster it used to be.

One of the key metrics I will take into account is behaviour in low
mem conditions -- and I plan on asking MySQL devs and Pg devs to give
us a bit of help configuring them. Off the cuff, I'd compare...

 - Stability / sanity
 - Good performance & behaviour in memory-constrained, low-end HW scenarios
 - Our core webapps/apps/libs support it
 - Strong dev community
    - multiple vendors contributing on one codebase
    - one or more talented and respected leaders - can resolve conflicts
    - growing dev activity (number of patches, number of authors)
 - Random apps out there support it (long last in priority...)

the strategy of giving the community a significant weight is what I
followed for OSVLE to pick an LMS. It picked moodle back then when it
was clunkier and had less features (at first glance) than the rest.
But the architecture made more sense, and the community was on fire -
I'm ready to make the same "mistake" again! ;-)

cheers,



martin