Thursday, September 02, 2004

PostgreSQL 8 - windows install pack.

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller

I just installed the windows installer for pgsql8 and it comes with
- the RDBMS server (windows service)
- RDBMS documentation
- ODBC driver
- JDBC driver
- .NET data provider (npgsql.dll)
- PGAdminIII (GUI admin/devel client tool)
- PGAdmin documentation (CHM file including RDBMS help)

The whole lot comes down in 12MB!
Pretty amazing considdering similar functionality from other RDBMSs are hundreds of MB and take hours to setup in some cases.
It literally took m 5mins to download/install/configure/test the whole shebang. I guess the reason why I'm impressed with that is I know the end product is at least as valuable as all the other so-called "heavy-weights" like Oracle and MS SQL.

The .NET stuff looks good. I've had some experience developing to MS SQL using C# and it's nice to know that I can use pg natively. Honestly, the whole package is so small you could easily bundle it with a small desktop app no problems at all. It's not like you have to worry about licencing.

Currently I'm using some nice GUI tools to work with pg which speeds up productivity a LOT. http://www.ems-hitech.com/pgmanager/screenshots.phtml

started working on a new photo gallery - AGAIN...

This is like the 5th time I've started building an online photo album app from the ground up. The main reason I began it in the first place was so that I could have total control over the feature set. Problem is, I'm not even happy with what I do myself so I keep knocking it down and starting again.

oh well...

This time round I'm considdering the following features

  • transparent content syndication between album sites
  • XSL skins (as always) -- and lots of them...
  • album heirachies (as always)
  • comprehensive and granualar access control and security
  • user group heirachies
  • preview before publish mode
  • clever caching (to protect RDBMS)
  • optimisation for a clustered configuration
  • unlimited photo size options (std thumbs/sizes + custom)
  • favourites
  • integrated threaded discusion on albums and album object using linkable threads
  • polling
  • skin upload
  • batch file upload
  • batch image rotation
  • image cropping
  • exif info extraction (as always)
  • user-customisable metadata items (fields)
  • Full XML support (for export etc)
  • custom module API (down the track)
I'm toying around with using the name InterAlbum to denote it's distributed nature.

My status