Ruby on Rails and postgres

Postgres is definately not the db of choice for Rails developers, or at least that's the impression I get.

That's a pity, because there is almost no real reason for the average application to use mysql over postgres and a lot of good reasons TO use postgres.*

There are some nice howto's on shoehorning some of postgresql's advanced features into Active Record - like this one : Howto Use Postgres Views As Tables

* For a dissertation on why MySQL is not a good database see this article on OpenACS.org. Note that this article is old and some of the misgivings are dealt with in current MySQL versions, but not all - and those that are mostly require you to use InnoDB tables which remove much the speed benefit MySQl is supposed to deliver.

More up to date "gripe-lists" about MySQL can be found easily, such as MySQL Gotchas.

My biggest issue that prevents me from using it (even when it might seem a good choice) is the way that it makes arbitrary changes and casts to your data without asking. That's just going to make a big mess one day that I would rather not debug!

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