Hello, I'm Piotr Krukowiecki, aka Cvbge, your new (for almost three months) PostgreSQL maintainer. As some people have noticed, there was a poll running on drupal.org last week. This text summarises feedback gathered in the poll's comments, lists problems with PostgreSQL support in Drupal, and shows my plans on how to improve it. It also includes a help request (last item, but probably most important!)

The results of the poll are: 88% of voters use MySQL only, and 11% of votes use PostgreSQL or both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Although some people find these PostgreSQL results better than they expected, I feel that the number of PostgreSQL users is lower than it could be. I'm going to undertake some steps to change this -- details later in this post.

Only 11%?

The comments posted for the poll were even more interesting than the poll results itself. The general message was that people would like to use PostgreSQL with Drupal, but were unable to. Reasons given were:

• Bugs in core Drupal: It can't be denied that some parts of Drupal 4.6 do not work well with PostgreSQL databases. The bugs are being fixed, but it's still far from perfect. The next Drupal release series, 4.7, is going to be much better in this respect.
• Bugs in contributed modules: As the poll shows, most users of Drupal (and thus modules authors) use MySQL to develop and test their code. They usually do not provide database schemas for PostgreSQL, which is very easy to fix, or use non-standard (MySQL specific) SQL queries. It'd be very hard for Drupal developers to check/fix all contributed modules, considering there are about 220 contributed modules for the entire 4.6 branch.
• Not enough support for PostgreSQL: Lack of PostgreSQL install instructions (a patch for this is pending), no central place for PostgreSQL (wannabe) users, nearly no documentation, etc..
• Last but not least: fewer hosts offering PostgreSQL databases. Not much we can do about this.

So what am I planning to do?

• Fix more bugs in Drupal core! I don't see a good way to directly improve contributed module quality. This will depend mainly on the module authors who proactively address PostgreSQL installations.
• Improve PostgreSQL support. This would include handbook pages, forums, and maybe a mailing list for the PostgreSQL database only.
• Educate MySQL users on how to write 'standard' SQL code - a list of things to avoid when coding, 'strict mode' in MySQL 5, SQL validators, etc.

Help wanted!

• You can help by testing patches. Even if you don't use PostgreSQL, you can still test them. Often, patches for PostgreSQL issues change code that also affects MySQL users.
• I'm looking for people who have an existing Drupal 4.6 with PostgreSQL set up to test the update path from 4.6 to 4.7 works. Please send me messages using my Drupal.org contact form or reach me on IRC (nick Cvbge).