624Part IVConnectionslovers in (1 on 1 web hosting) the audience, it may seem
624Part IVConnectionslovers in the audience, it may seem odd to sell these features as disadvantages. Don t flameus yet. We re just taking a moment to expound on the Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS) philoso- phy. You don t need a sledgehammer to drive in a picture nail, and you don t need an objectrelational database to store addresses and phone numbers. Some folks will debate this point, but simply put, PostgreSQL is not as fast as MySQL underlow-load circumstances. At some point, PostgreSQL s more robust design will offer perfor- mance advantages in really large datasets, but on average, MySQL is just that little bit perkierfor lots of reads. Again, if you have simpler data storage and retrieval needs, there s no needfor you to go swimming around in the PostgreSQL waters. Finally, PostgreSQL is more complicated. Permissions management, for one, is not as clear- cut as it is with MySQL. PostgreSQL also offers some features that may cause the novice seyes to glaze over Schemas and Stored Procedures, while useful, aren t strictly necessaryand you may find them to be clutter. Some people work much better when there are nononessentials on their desks; the same principle may hold true here. All these things said, on balance PostgreSQL is a great tool a superlative tool even formany jobs. Its userbase may be smaller than MySQL s, but its devotees tend to be very loyal. We can t cover it very comprehensively and still stay within the focus of this book; but ifyou ve gotten this far, weighed all the benefits and disadvantages, and you choosePostgreSQL, the rest of this chapter should set you off in the right direction. Why Object-Relational Anyway? Object relational databases (ORDBMS) are a relatively new class of product compared to therelational database model that was developed in the early 1970s. In addition to implementingthe relational model discussed in Chapter 13, ORDBMS borrow from pure object databases, which excel at handling media objects, spatial, and series style data. An ORDBMS implementsobject properties on the components of a relational database in order to have the benefit ofboth worlds. This, in turn, facilitates interaction with the object features of PHP. BecausePHP s object model is significantly more powerful in version 5, there s never been a bettertime to use these two tools together. This means that choosing PostgreSQL potentially offers the developer greater extensibility. It s fairly easy to define and add custom data types, operators, functions, and indexing meth- ods. This has far reaching implications for fine-tuning performance; especially when workingwith particularly complicated data structures. At the data structure level, PostgreSQL tables and objects can benefit from either static ordynamic inheritance. That is to say, a child object created from its parent can be made toadopt characteristics identical to those of the parent either just once when it is created, orperpetually (as changes are made to the parent, they are passed on to the children). Installing PostgreSQLPostgreSQL is known to run on Linux, most Unix variants, and with the help of the Cygwinframework (http://cygwin.com/), can even made to be run on Windows although if per- formance is your priority, this arrangement is suboptimal. In keeping with the focus of thisbook, we re going to follow the steps for a typical Linux installation. The procedure for the39
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