Experiences with VA Smalltalk and ODBC on Linux?

Hi there and Happy New Year to everybody,

I wonder if anybody in this group has experience with using VA Smalltalk with ODBC (and even more precisely, PostgreSQL) on Linux (Ubuntu)? We are in an early stage of thinking about moving our Glorp-based VAST application from DB2 (which we chose because of VAST's good driver support for it) to PostgreSQL. VAST does not ship a native PostgreSQL Driver, which I hope will change....

I remember trying Linux and ODBC with VAST on Linux (SuSE or LST) about 10 or even more years ago. It was everything but a nice experience back then, I think mostly because ODBC on Linux wasn't really ready for production back then.

So is anybody using VAST with ODBC on Linux? I'd be interested in your experiences, opinions et al.

Joachim

Hi Joachim,

Lou,

thanks for sharing your experiences. I am very sceptical towards ODBC on Linux for several reasons, most of them being related to the too many moving parts theorem ;-) We see so many little and severe problems with things like UTF-8 and ISO-8859-15, and each layer adds to that. In our case, this is mostly the web browser, Ajax, Seaside/VAST and DB2 and the external world. Each of them more or less tries to enforce their own rules about whether a wish for accepting strings encoded in a certain character set. Often enough, that stuff is incompatible and you have to live with the outcome.

Your experiences with MS/SQL on Windows don't sound like a nice journey.

OTOH, there is an ODBC driver for postgres maintained by the postgres project, both for Linux and Windows.

Why move away from DB2? First of all, DB2 works very well with VAST and Glorp. So our reasons are not related to technical problems. DB2 needs a lot of housekeeping and it is very complicated to move Data from a Linux Db onto a Windows machine. You cannot simply restore a backup from Linux onto a Windows box. Some of our development happens on Windows machines, and there we have all kinds of problems, like a complicated process, broken stored procedures and such.
Then there is the pricing argument, of course.

Our deployment platform is Linux 64 bits and Postgres is a very nice database that just runs, installs easily (it's not much more than an apt-get on Ubuntu), it is well documented, supported by almost anything you can find on Linux. We currently run mysql on our servers for several packages, like Wordpress, and DB2 for the Smalltallk app. We also have some SQLite in our small deployment. These all eat memory and cycles. If we could move just use one database manager (and DB2 is not supported by many O/S packages), we could concentrate our knowledge, unify backup procedures and save money. The price point of our edition of DB2 currently is very sympathetic (exress-c is free to use), but once we grow enough, there will be some rapid rise.

These are more or less med- or logn term thoughts, and I just want to think through some of the options...


Joachim



Am Mittwoch, 4. Januar 2017 19:48:04 UTC+1 schrieb Louis LaBrunda:

Hi Joachim,

Happy new year to you too.

I use ODBC and MS/SQL on windows.  I wouldn't if I didn't have to.  It works but there are sometimes funny errors, like not being able to find a row the exists.  Locks there doesn't seem to be a good reason for.  Errors that don't return with much if any error codes.  

It is hard to tell if the problems lie in MS/SQL or ODBC.  If I remember correctly, ODBC is a Microsoft invention, so to the extents it has problems, I expect they are worse on Linux.

May I ask, why are you moving from DB2 to PostgreSQL?

Lou

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 1:09:19 PM UTC-5, Joachim Tuchel wrote:

Hi there and Happy New Year to everybody,

I wonder if anybody in this group has experience with using VA Smalltalk with ODBC (and even more precisely, PostgreSQL) on Linux (Ubuntu)? We are in an early stage of thinking about moving our Glorp-based VAST application from DB2 (which we chose because of VAST's good driver support for it) to PostgreSQL. VAST does not ship a native PostgreSQL Driver, which I hope will change....

I remember trying Linux and ODBC with VAST on Linux (SuSE or LST) about 10 or even more years ago. It was everything but a nice experience back then, I think mostly because ODBC on Linux wasn't really ready for production back then.

So is anybody using VAST with ODBC on Linux? I'd be interested in your experiences, opinions et al.

Joachim