[CS-FSLUG] Church Management Software

[David Aikema]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Micah Yoder <yoderm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:55 PM, David Aikema <david at aikema.net> wrote:
>
>  >  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 don't think any of that would be a big deal.  If this is running on
>  Linux, we can just grab the PostgreSQL that is included with the
>  distro, and it will get automatic security updates.  PG is also fully
>  supported in Windows in case we want to allow people to go that way.

Although the package may be called different things on each
distribution (or have slightly different defaults), increasing the
amount of effort required to package the program.  There's also the
potential that someone else may already be using Postgres on the
machine - or may wish to do so in the future - which would again make
the configuration again more complicated.

>  >  A DB abstraction layer gives you the option of either.
>
>  And forces you to use the least common denominator of their feature sets.

Or builds its own interface giving you a nicer feature set than the
original databases.  (It could translate something allowed by one
command in database software X to a series of commands to accomplish
the same thing in database software Y).

>  >  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).
>
>  Well I'd argue that PG being open source has no "proprietary
>  features."  Given the project's track record though, I think it's safe
>  to rely on it.  They've been going well over 10 years and development
>  and the strength of the community are only accelerating.

Read: proprietary = not adhering to standards

Taking advantage of non-standard features makes the product more
fragile to change in the product which it uses.  I'm not sure if this
is still the case but at least in the past the Linux kernel could only
be built using the GNU compiler suite due to its use of extensions.  I
think that there may now be a patch for the kernel which allows it to
be built with the Intel C compiler (which, generally speaking, has a
better optimizer).  I consider this a deficiency of the Linux kernel,
not a positive feature.

Dave