Re: Running PostgreSQL on Windows

Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 21:01:07 +0530
From: "karthikeyan.balasubramanian" <karthikeyan(dot)balasubramanian(at)aspiresys(dot)com>
>
> I want to work with PostgreSQL on Win98 (that's my development
> environment). I know that through Cygwin its possible
> but I don't that. I want my Windows PHP program to work comfortably with
> PostgreSQL much like it worked with Mysql.
> Why is PostgreSQL not like this but need unix like environment to make it run.
>
Note that the Cygwin environment is only necessary to run the PostgreSQL *server*
on Win32.

On the client side there are (at least) two native Win32 options:
- use the Win32 ODBC driver (available as binary from the PG main sites);
if you are already accessing MySQL via ODBC that would allow a seamless
transition
- compile the Postgres client library libpq from the sources with VisualC++
and use libpq for accessing Postgres.
AFAIK there is currently no binary distribution of libpq.dll available
and other compilers than VisualC++ are not supported (not even Borland
or MingW32).

As to the server, I believe there is a native Win32 planned for version 7.4.
But that is usually not such an issue, because the database server has nothing
to do with the client devellopment platform.

> It is so easy to setup MySQL, just download it and install the ODBC
> program and type mysql from the command prompt in the mysql directory.
>
Actually PostgreSQL is much more powerful than MySQL. This has the drawback
that it requires more administrative knowledge and some configuration effort.

Hope this helps,

Christoph Dalitz