Andrej Koelewijn

PostgreSQL version 8 has been released. The biggest change is that Windows is now a supported platform.

For someone like me who mainly works with Oracle databases, PostgreSQL is a much better fit than MySQL. PostgreSQL supports many features which i use daily on Oracle databases: stored procedures, schema’s, views, sequences, etc.

I’m currently using MySQL 4.0 for the Jumpteam website, but i’d rather use PostgreSQL. One reason: Unions. The site started on MySQL 3. No support for unions. Now we’re using MySQL 4.0.18. MySQL 4.0’s union is seriously broken. This has been fixed in newer versions, but unfortunately i can’t upgrade MySQL on this machine.

Update Initially i wrote here that PostgreSQL supports inline views, but some google research seems to indicate otherwise. And apparently MySQL supports inline views as of version 4.1. Seems it’s time to upgrade MySQL to version 4.1 instead of moving to PostgreSQL.

Another update Joseph commented that PostgreSQL does support inline views. I guess they’re not called inline views in PostgreSQL though. When you search in the PostgreSQL documentation for inline view nothing helpfull comes up.

Another update Inline views are called sub-selects in PostgresSQL.

The register has a piece on google’s new link attribute to prevent comment spam: Google’s No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web

Overall is a pretty negative piece:

It’s effectively declaring PageRank™ dead for weblogs, in an attempt to stem the problem.

“If such a tag were used widespread against comments and trackbacks, then wouldn’t this end up kneecaping blogs, by killing their intricate networks of interlinks?”

I don’t think the impacts are as negative as this, if you only use the nofollow attribute in comments. Blog entries can still link to other blog entries, and these will still be followed by google’s spiders.

Comment spam is a big pain, so i’m happy to see that google is trying to help prevent it: Preventing comment spam.

Oreilly has an interesting read: Run Mac OS X on a PC. Apparently it’s even usable on a 3Ghz processor.