Re: A newbie's opinion - postgres NEEDS a Windows binary!

--- "Robert J. Sanford, Jr." <rsanford(at)nolimitsystems(dot)com> wrote:
> my personal belief is that a win32 native version of postgres
> would resolve the connection issues and allow many more people
> to adopt postgres.

I totally agree with you, but as I explain below that really cannot
happen.

> this is of course coming from someone that isn't contributing
> to the code base and will therefore only "complain" about this
> this one time and will accept any virtual beatings you care to
> deliver ;)
>
> given that i don't have any grasp of the postgres code base any
> suggestion that i offer up will be simply grasping at straws.
> i do know that the apache group has had similar problems with
> win2k and their new architecture is targeted at resolving
> multi-platform issues by providing a platform independent layer
> for networking and file manipulation. their performance under
> win2k is orders of
> magnitude better not having to go through the posix layer. my
> guess is that this required a near total rewrite on their part
> and would probably require the same on the part of the postgres
> team.

PostgreSQL is built with a multi-process model, rather than a
multi-threaded model such as MySQL. The win32 platform cannot handle
a multi-process model and probably never will (it would not be in
MS's best interests nowadays anyway). This is what makes a port a
major difficulty and would set the PostgreSQL team back months to
years in development time. IMHO it is much more important to
increase the functionality, stability, and speed of the *NIX version.
If you want to use PostgreSQL in a production environment then pick
up a copy of Linux or FreeBSD. These OSes a load easier to learn,
use, and maintain than you win32-only people would think. I am a
win32 to Linux convert so you will have to trust me on this ;) Plus,
you can use any number of GUI tools that run on win32 to manipulate
PostgreSQL: Access, Webmin, Putty, Winsql, phpPgAdmin.

Brent

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