First just let me say Heroku rocks, and I am super impressed with what you guys have put together. It's a huge advancement for rails so kudos all around!
Basically I just wanted to express some feedback which might help make an already great product a little better. Originally, I was open to the idea of you guys using Postgresql because even though it is non standard for rails, I figured you must have your reasons, and Rails is database agnostic, right? So it couldn't matter. But slowly, I have hit some little problems which have made it less and less database agnostic. Here are a few: 1. When it came time to implement full text searching, my first choice (sphinx) was out and i saw a thread where you guys suggested tsearch2 for Postgresql. I managed to get this up and running, but to test/ develop it I now had to switch to postgresql locally. 2. Since I was no longer able to develop locally with MySQL, I had to take an hour to get Postgresql installed correctly on my mac. Then perhaps the toughest change was finding a good graphical editor to view my database and debug as I was going through. I finally found one called Navicat that is halfway decent (still no where as good as the free Sequel Pro for MySQL on mac) but it costs money and my 30 day trial is slowly ticking away. 3. Another unexpected change is that Postgresql apparently does case sensitive searches by default. Despite supposedly being database agnostic, lots of rails apps (and plugins I'm using) do lines like this user = User.find(:all, :conditions=>["name LIKE ?", "brian"]) So despite testing it locally with MySQL, I now have a variety of duplicates in my production database from case sensitivity. This caught me totally off guard. I've had to go through and change code from a number of plugins to use ILIKE instead of LIKE which postgresql apparently prefers. I've had to learn all this since I'm totally unfamiliar with Postgresql. user = User.find(:all, :conditions=>["name ILIKE ?", "brian"]) This last one is when it finally hit me, is the trade off still worth it? I'm not sure what the advantages are of Postgresql, but if the goal is to make rails development and deployment easier, then using something non-standard that people aren't as familiar with can certainly have some drawbacks. Maybe it's possible to offer both MySQL and Postgresql and let people choose? It hasn't been enough for me to stop using Heroku or anything like that, but just thought I'd share my opinion. Thanks, Brian http://BuyersVote.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Heroku" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/heroku?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
