Why use Open Source when Microsoft products are so cheap... 10012

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, Beowulf TrollsHammer wrote on 11 Aug 2005 08:13:51 -0700

Oh, for the love of -- I must have missed this piece of absolute dimwittery earlier.

First off, in a properly-administered system nobody has access to that data except ~postgres, and ~postgres is not for user access but for DB administration (creating databases, backing up and restoring, that sort of thing). Second off, PostgreSQL has a fair number of access tools to get at the database -- such as psql -- and reading the files directly is an invitation to trouble. It's a bit like trying to figure out where the fuel goes in a car while driving it by looking under the hood (that might look a little funny for about 5 seconds until one careens into a tree or worse), or poking around a consultant's client files.

Those files are for PostgreSQL's benefit. I'd frankly have to look to see exactly what they are but I suspect they are full of records, indexes, and such -- and not something the casual reader would be all that interested in.

Of course DFS is apparently using Windows anyway, slapping PostgreSQL on it. While that works, there's a few issues. I'm looking at an installed PostgreSQL on my Linux system. :-)

Not sure how advanced PostgreSQL's code is, though that's mostly because I've not looked at it. I suspect a lot of it is mind-numbingly boring (but needed) stuff like keeping track of where the data is, and checking SQL syntax. :-) But the Linux kernel is all implemented in C and buttembly, and has a fair number of rather advanced concepts, such as inheritance. (I kid you not. The filesystem code uses a variant of C++ VTBLs, explicitly implemented as structures full of pointers to functions. Straightforward, powerful, a little weird-looking. Of course filesystem code's primary purpose is to ensure files and the data contained therewithin are put in the right place.)

No doubt WPA makes certain vendors happy. :-)

-- It's still legal to go .sigless.