Interbase/Firebird (firebird is open source based on interbase) also have arrays.
PostgresQL seems to have something like this, see: http://www.sql.org/sql-database/postgresql/manual/arrays.html (for those who need yet another reason to switch :-) )
It's very fast ad very light, if you need extra things you can search an already made extentions or create your own...
Yes, PostgreSQL is a fine DB and there is every good reason to switch :-) It only suffers from two main problems that I can see:
1. It's annoying to create a table with an auto-incremented field (i.e: serial int)
For some reason you have to issue 4 commands... go figure their design decision.
In Interbase you can impliment it as a trigger... you do not need to start massing things very much... Also stored procedure increase your speed of making things and give you the result as it where a table.
2. It still lacks a native Win32 port (for those who need it). This is a big onefirebird is developed under Unix, and have Unix,Linux,Windows,SunOS (Solrais -> also a unix) ports that work the same way on all of them.
as it is currently only available for Unix/Linux.
firebird support many charset including unicode... And you can define each (var)char field to have it's own charset...
Luckily it handles UNICODE and other encodings really well out of the box, as opposed to MySQL :-)
Now i like firebird because it's been a very long time out-there, you have java, delphi,freepascal,c, c++, php, perl support for it, and it's was made by people who worked with interbase and like it, and convinced Borland to open interbase to community (version 6.1 of interbase was open, and firebird is based on it). The database iteself is very fast and light (if you want more functions inside an sql, you need to use an extention). The licence give you ability to work in commercial enviorment (unlike MySQL), and you can tweak it (if you understand what you are doing offcurse) per record, table and database, witch make it very flexible, and strong soted.
Eli
It compete on the market of large amount of data (billions of records), you can divide the database itself acording to the database size/amount of records.. witch make it easier to backup your data...
You can update the database to new version with two console command only...
And thats for start :)
I never worked with PostgreSQL, althou i know it's very good... But i'm also known to be un othordox with my proffesional choises... i usualy peak the one that is good for my work rather then popular... usualy it prove itself with the result and time spent on a project...
Ido -- Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.
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