PostGIS, SQL Server, Oracle spatial compares and other news
PostGIS, SQL Server 2008 R2, Oracle 11G R2 We just completed our compare of the spatial functionality of PostgreSQL 8.4/PostGIS 1.5, SQL Server 2008 R2, Oracle 11G R2 (both its built-in Locator and...
View ArticleSTRICT on SQL Function Breaks In-lining Gotcha
One of the coolest features of PostgreSQL is the ability to write functions using plain old SQL. This feature it has had for a long time. Even before PostgreSQL 8.2. No other database to our knowledge...
View ArticleImporting data into PostgreSQL using Open Office Base 3.2
A while ago we demonstrated how to use Open Office Base to connect to a PostgreSQL server using both the native PostgreSQL SBC and the PostgreSQL JDBC driver. The routine for doing the same in Open...
View ArticleOf Camels and People: Converting back and forth from Camel Case, Pascal Case...
When it comes to naming things in databases and languages, there are various common standards. For many languages the camel family of namings is very popular. For unix based databases usually UPPER or...
View ArticleUsing LTree to Represent and Query Hierarchy and Tree Structures
PostgreSQL offers several options for displaying and querying tree like structures. In Using Recursive Common Table Expressions (CTE) to represent tree structures we demonstrated how to use common...
View ArticlePgAdmin III 1.13 - change in plugin architecture and PostGIS Plugins
One of the neat changes already present in the PgAdmin III 1.13dev, is the change in plugin architecture. Version 1.13 dev allows for multiple plugin*.ini files. How does this work. Well if you have a...
View Articlegreatest and least - oldies but goodies
Problem: You have a set of numbers, or characters or whatever and you are trying to find the max or min of this set? If the values are separate records in a table or query, the answer is well known...
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Hello LibreOffice, Goodbye OpenOffice
Many people have been concerned with Oracle's stewardship of past Sun Microsystems open source projects. There are Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris to name a few. Why are people concerned? Perhaps the...
View ArticleString Aggregation in PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MySQL
Question: You have a table of people and a table that specifies the activities each person is involved in. You want to return a result that has one record per person and a column that has a listing of...
View ArticleWhy choose or not choose PostgreSQL?
Many of our customers ask us this question so we thought we'd lay down our thoughts. The last couple of our articles have been how to do this and that in PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MySQL or having...
View ArticlePostGIS in Action - E-Book final version officially out
I am happy to report, that the final proof of the PostGIS in Action E-Book got released today and the printed version is scheduled for release Aprill 11th, 2011 and should be available on Amazon and...
View ArticleUsing Domains to Enforce Business Rules
We like to enforce business rules at the database level wherever we can, for the simple reason, particularly the business we are in, most database update happens outside the end-user application...
View ArticleSQL Server to PostgreSQL: Converting table structure
We've been working on converting some of our SQL Server apps to PostgreSQL. In this article we'll describe some things to watch out for and provide a function we wrote to automate some of the...
View ArticleThe Pure Relational Database is dead
A lot of redditers took offense at our article XPathing XML data with PostgreSQL with the general consensus, if you are going to be stuffing XML in a relational database where will you stop? That is...
View ArticleThe Relational Model is very much alive
In our article The Pure Relational database is dead there were a lot of misunderstandings as a result of our poor choice of words. People thought we were bashing the relational model because in their...
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