[CS-FSLUG] Church Management Software

[David Aikema]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Micah Yoder <yoderm at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I like to advocate simply using PostgreSQL and forget about
>  abstraction, because:
>  * It has as many features as any open source engine
>  * It has a VERY strong community and is NOT going away
>  * It is multi-platform
>  * It has a rich feature set ... transactions, ACID, schemas, boatloads
>  of built in types and functions, storable procedures in many
>  languages, now full-text search
>  * It has a BSD license, allowing it to be used with software of any license
>  * It is not tied to the whims of a single company
>  * It has a very sane user/role/permission structure (unlike others ...
>  *cough* MySQL *cough*)
>
>  In other words, it has everything anyone could hope for.  An
>  abstraction layer would turn the DB into a dumb storage engine, while
>  PostgreSQL is capable of much more than that.  Making full use of its
>  functionality could potentially save quite a bit of work.
>
>  If we produce a suite of software that someone would want to install,
>  they would simply install its prerequisites -- which we could define
>  as PostgreSQL.  I don't think the pastor of a small church would care
>  to have to chose engines, especially if PG were automatically set up
>  in the install process. :)

But then you have to worry about the security of Postgresql
(passwords, security updates), remembering to install/uninstall
postgresql all the time, dealing with the possibility that there's
already a database server running somewhere, starting/stopping the
database server, or that this may be a shared machine, etc.

I tend to like the possibilities of SQlite - http://www.sqlite.org/ -
public domain, small footprint, and in use by a lot of well known
companies.  Another potential issue would appear to be be ease of
backup - SQLite works by copying files - other databases may require
use of export tools as the binary format may be incompatible between
platforms.

A DB abstraction layer gives you the option of either.

And... speaking of proprietary stuff ... how much do you want to use
proprietary features of any database?  (I don't think that a church is
likely to impose any sort of high load, that the advanced features
might be useful for).

Dave