Re: Getting started - Interfacing questions

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 11:02:23AM -0500, Sean Davis wrote:
>
> On Mar 8, 2005, at 10:07 AM, David wrote:
>
> >This came to me privately but not to the list.
>
> Oops, my bad.

Looks like it's back on track :)

> >On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 06:15:18AM -0500, Sean Davis wrote:
> >>I didn't mean to complicate things.

> >You didn't, really. What I'm trying to do is to see all my options
> >before I get too deeply involved in a certain path.

> Getting input is the realm of the client application, not the server,
> generally, yes.

> Actually, all database transactions, etc., will rely on SQL to a large
> degree.

Yes, I understand that. What I've been concerned about is getting the
data to the SQL interface in a reasonably intuitive fashion.

> I would start with pgAdmin III, as it will graphically allow
> you to interact with your database. Alternatively, you can use pgEdit
> (a nice tool with many of the benefits of psql), but you will write .

pgEdit would be a good choice, but if I understood what I read on the
web site, it is only available for Windows and Mac? I took it that
there was no Linux package. I much prefer to do everything under Linux
- well, actually I only have Win98 and thus no NTFS filesystem which,
AIUI, is practically a requirement.

As far as the GUI interfaces are concerned, although I've not tried
pgAdmin, I've played around with pgaccess a little, but unless I'm
missing something, all I can see it doing is allowing you to write SQL
scripts and does nothing I can't do from psql with little or no extra
effort.

> That is likely all that you will need. Then, you can go about choosing
> the language, API, tool that you can experiment to your heart's
> content.

Probably that's what I'm in most need of doing, more experimenting.

> Working with databases is quite well-worked-out for most of
> the higher languages (including C),

Yes, I can see that from the descriptions in the documentation.
Practically all seem to be really quite well developed.

> so you really just need to pick one
> and start learning how to go about interacting with the database in
> that language. There are typically numerous websites of a tutorial
> nature for building database-based scripts/programs/tools.

That's a fact. There's so much, it's hard to find where to start.
Right now, I'm studying and restudying the HTML documentation that comes
with Postgresql.

> So, you
> will have to commit to something and then let us know when you get hung
> up.

I'm sure I can get hung up easily enough... :)