Re: GNU Cash (lack of) support of Postgres

On Mar 7, 2006, at 4:30 PM, Chris Browne wrote:
> I used to be involved with the project; haven't had time in quite a
> while, which prevents me from being terribly influential about the
> matter.
>
> What they are thinking of doing is to adopt SQLite
> <http://www.sqlite.org/> as a storage system.
>
> Basically, they're NOT interested in pushing any burden of database
> administration on users, which means they aren't keen on:
>
> a) Requiring particular additional packages to be installed
>
> (there is no lack of dependancies already)
>
> b) Requiring management of pg_hba.conf
>
> The users *they're* keen on getting are ones that want to get
> something to replace Quicken, to whom configuring a DBMS would
> seem like overkill.
>
> By the same token, they immediately *lose* several things, by ruling
> out PostgreSQL in favor of pretty well anything else...
>
> - PostgreSQL has Good Numeric Types for Money, and very robust
> data types in general
> - Stored procs could be very helpful for balance analysis
> - There are places where they could *really* use triggers

Doesn't SQLite support most of that?

Hopefully they'll at least keep things well architected so that it's
fairly easy to port to PostgreSQL should someone want to do that in
the future. But the way things are setup right now (ie: not using
transactions very well), there wouldn't be much benefit to using
PostgreSQL anyway...

> But the two big reasons are ones they are evidently allowing to
> override things.
>
> Forcing PostgreSQL on people would be something of a non-starter,
> thereby making the would-be benefits pretty irrelevant, and when they
> are having a fairly tough time time with the existing burden of code
> (which they need to port to GNOME 2, for instance), adding effort,
> with no actual benefit (because they can't trust the database with
> types, procs, or triggers since they won't use it universally).

--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com
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