I've gotten used too much using products from leading software companies, well, that was the trend here, during the last decade, proprietary software rule almost every workstation in this country in almost every aspect. What else there is to say, these software provides anything that every user needs, even beginners find them too user friendly and can be learned for just a fraction of time.
That trend is about to change. Why? Blame it to the price that users need to pay to be able to have a licensed software in their workstation, yes, while proprietary software promises to deliver what users need, their cost starts to skyrocket as well. That is even one of the main reasons of the proliferation of pirated software in this country, proprietary software are good but their sky high prices make them very “unaffordable” to the public. Pinoy's patience was put to test in here, we started to think of other means to battle high priced software without compromising quality of our works, alas! Open source technology was finally introduced by a few who learned about it while abroad or by constantly surfing the net, things began to change. I will discuss here some of the open source technology that I personally use in my everyday life.
Let me start by introducing to you PostgreSQL (www.postgresql.org), for sure, many of my fellow IT countrymen never heard of this software. Here is a definition of PostgreSQL from the site's about page:
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. It is fully ACID compliant, has full support for foreign keys, joins, views, triggers, and stored procedures (in multiple languages). It includes most SQL92 and SQL99 data types, including INTEGER, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN, CHAR, VARCHAR, DATE, INTERVAL, and TIMESTAMP. It also supports storage of binary large objects, including pictures, sounds, or video. It has native programming interfaces for C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, ODBC, among others, and exceptional documentation.
An enterprise class database, PostgreSQL boasts sophisticated features such as Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC), point in time recovery, tablespaces, asynchronous replication, nested transactions (savepoints), online/hot backups, a sophisticated query planner/optimizer, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. It supports international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode, and it is locale-aware for sorting, case-sensitivity, and formatting. It is highly scalable both in the sheer quantity of data it can manage and and in the number of concurrent users it can accommodate. There are active PostgreSQL systems in production environments that manage in excess of 4 terabytes of data.
As you can see, PostgreSQL, is a relational database system, that could provide us all the functionality that we need that we can only find from proprietary relational database system. And the good thing about it? It's FREE! Yes, it is released under the BSD License (see http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence for the complete explanation of the license), anyone can use PostgreSQL to manage their personal or company database. All they have to do is to download the file from their site or from mirror sites. I've been using this system for only a couple of years, but the impact that it gave my in-house software was great, before, I only use .mdb for my database, because our company is in a tight budget, and spending thousands of pesos for a SQL server is out of every CEO's mind. I get a lot of comment from my users because of the too slow connection just to retrieve a few records from our database. That is why when we have learned about this from one of our staff, we started studying and researching about PostgreSQL. After few months of research and testing, we were able to deploy a SQL server using PostgreSQL, we were able to use it with our VB projects because they also provide the PSQLodbc that helps in the connectivity that we thought was our major problem if we want to use it in our system. Now all I can say is that, we were able to satisfy our clients and we were able to develop more software for our company because our SQL server delivers what we really needed that we can only get from a proprietary software. Thanks to you guys.
