The birth of the open source enterprise stack [LWN.net]

The birth of the open source enterprise stack

Posted Jun 27, 2006 14:22 UTC (Tue) by tjc (subscriber, #137)
In reply to: The birth of the open source enterprise stack by nix
Parent article: The birth of the open source enterprise stack

It's not the amount of documentation that's important, it's the how well it's written, and -- especially important -- how well it's indexed (or searchable -- I'm a big fan of "on one page" manuals).

I can't comment on PostgreSQL's current state of documentation, but five years ago when I was doing a lot of internet programming I found MySQL and PHP both to have decent documentation, which is one of the major reaons I used them. I was able to learn enough PHP in a few days to get started, owing mostly to it's C-like syntax and comprehensive online function index, and MySQL was greatly aided by Paul DuBois' excellent book on the subject.

At the time PostgreSQL was complicated to configure, and Phython didn't look much like C. If I were doing internet programming today (and had more time), I might choose differently.

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The birth of the open source enterprise stack

Posted Jun 29, 2006 6:29 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

PostgreSQL still is complex to configure, but only a very small amount needs to be done unless you're running a large site (in which case MySQL would need configuration too, if it coped at all).

The default config values for some things (shared memory size, notably) are laughably small: suitable for testing only. I don't know why they start out *so* small, but it's easy to change them.