PostgreSQL support, is it a yes or no?

Author Message

henrik gudat

Wednesday 18 July 2007 5:51:10 am

Hi,

we are about to start migrating a major web site to eZ Publish. We have selected this system not only because of its obviously great feature set in the front row but also because it has, or better had, official support for PostgreSQL. I do not want to enter the eternal PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. you name it, but I think it's all but fair to say that PostgreSQL is a decent database. It is our favourite database for the reason alone that we are running a big system on postgres already and only want to do database maintenance once.

I now read in the Community Newsletter that eZ Systems decided to remove PostgreSQL clustering support. This is, to be precise, the end of PostgreSQL in eZ Publish.

Clustering support is essential for keeping scalability of a system. Without such a growth path, eZ Publish is out of the loop for anything that may ever outgrow a single server setup. (I understand there may be workarounds, but IMHO only database-side clustering is a clean solution.)

I have gotten very mixed messages about PostgreSQL commitment in the past, and this is not good for eZ's marketing and planning on everyone else's end. It would be tremendously helpful to get rid off these uncertainties by either ending support for PostgreSQL or making it a full-blown option to MySQL. For me both would work (though I obviously prefer PostgreSQL for maintenance, hardware utilization reasons and personal affection), but the worst that can happen when inmidst of production such an essential feature is breaking away and you have to redo your infrastructure only because of this. To get back to the title, I think it should be either a clear yes or no because anything in between just adds to the confusion.

I would love to hear what others think about this.

regards,
henrik

Vidar Langseid

Friday 17 August 2007 8:20:11 am

Hi

Without a doubt, the big majority of eZ Publish users are using Mysql as database. However, some are also using PostgreSQL or Oracle. We will therefore still support these databases

However, the number of sites out there running PostgreSQL with *clustering* is very very low. At the time of writing I am not aware of anyone who are using it, neither community members or customers.

In 3.10 we have have used quite much effort in fixing issues in the mysql clustering code. During this work it became apparent that doing the same with PostgreSQL and Oracle would require just as much effort per port as we spent on the Mysql solution. The solution now is very Innodb specific. Since the use of clustering with PostgreSQL is effectively non-existent we chose as we did. Ending clustering support in oracle was a harder choice though since this is infact used, but by a very few.

We may then later consider reintroducing cluster support on postgresql when we are on PHP5 and are using the database component in eZ Components.

Best regards,
Vidar L

Powered by eZ Publish™ CMS Open Source Web Content Management. Copyright © 1999-2014 eZ Systems AS (except where otherwise noted). All rights reserved.