Re: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories

From: Jeff MacDonald <jeff(at)hub(dot)org>
To: Thomas Good <tomg(at)nrnet(dot)org>
Cc: Jeff MacDonald <info(at)pgsql(dot)com>, Bruce Momjian <maillist(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us>, pgsql-announce(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Re: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories
Date: 1999-06-10 19:42:58
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.10.9906101642270.2144-100000@penguin
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Tom,
This is perfect, in fact it's what I'm looking for, thanks

jeff.

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Thomas Good wrote:

> > From: Jeff MacDonald <jeff(at)hub(dot)org>
> > Reply-To: Jeff MacDonald <info(at)pgsql(dot)com>
> > To: pgsql-announce(at)postgresql(dot)org
> > Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Postgres Success Stories
> >
> > Greetings All,
> >
> > Do you use PostgreSQL ?
> > Do you love it ?
> > Do you want the world to know ?
>
> Jeff - will this suffice? If it is too terse I can flesh it out abit. ;-)
> Social Workers are notoriously verbose...thank God for the text data type!
>
>
> North Richmond Community Mental Health Center
> ---------------------------------------------
>
> is the Department of Psychiatry at the Sisters of Charity Medical Center,
> located in Staten Island, New York. We are a large department spanning
> two campuses (St. Vincent's Campus, formerly St. Vincent's Medical Center
> - and - Bayley Seton Campus - Formerly Bayley Seton Hospital.)
>
> We provide a full continuum of care for the mentally ill and chemically
> addicted persons of Staten Island. This includes emergency psychiatry
> (our Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program [ CPEP ]), inpatient
> psychiatry for adults and adolescents, outpatient services, residential
> services (housing for our clients with full case management services as
> well as vocational opportunities and training), ambulatory services
> (`day program' services), chemical and alcohol detoxification services,
> alcohol and addiction ambulatory programs, a mobile crisis unit and
> numerous other services all available to the people of Staten Island.
>
> The department of Residential Services currently has a PROGRESS database
> which provides clinical charting capabilities and administrative
> functionality. This database is being ported to PostgreSQL. We expect
> to go live 01 July 1999.
>
> The Psych Research dept had a FoxPro database that tracked every patient
> ever served at our facility - this was online 1986 - 1999.
> In the past year we have migrated the FoxPro database to PostgreSQL 6.3.2.
> It has been online for 9 months and has been very reliable.
>
> Deployment followed a 6 month process of evaluating other vendors. Sybase,
> Oracle, mSQL and mySQL were all evaluated as was Empress. The conclusion
> reached was that Oracle was the best commercial database available and
> that PostgreSQL was clearly the finest open source database on the market.
> In comparison shopping I was the primary person testing both Oracle and
> Postgres and found that Postgres compared favourably to Oracle. The
> psql interface is very similar to SQL*Plus in functionality and Postgres
> offers a comparable number of built in functions. Although Oracle possesses
> some nice features not available in Postgres (for example the nvl() function)
> we opted to go with Postgres for three reasons.
>
> 1) Compliance with ANSI standards: Oracle seems to lag way behind here.
> 2) Tech support offered by the Postgres mailing lists is superior to
> any tech support I've encountered, contracted or otherwise.
> 3) The Open Source aspect of Postgres. Although we have little cause
> to tinker with internals my shop is committed to Open Source. In as
> much as we are publicly funded we feel it is our mandate to keep
> our code in the public domain and to use open source code whenever
> possible.
>
> At the same time our shop began migrating away from proprietary databases
> we began the process of moving away from proprietary Unix. UnixWare is
> being phased out in favour of Slackware Linux and FreeBSD. However, it has
> been necessary to install PostgreSQL on UnixWare as an interim measure.
> In historical terms UnixWare has been something of a white elephant and
> consequently has a counter-intuitive feel to it. It was necessary to ask
> for some technical support from Bruce Momjian, a postgres developer with
> System V expertise, to get postgres installed on UnixWare. I'm pleased
> to report that the support was forthcoming and invaluable. Submitting the
> same query to PROGRESS and Postgres on the UnixWare machine is a nice way
> to demonstrate another feature of Postgres - the backend is relatively
> quick. At least by comparison with a proprietary database.
>
> At this point NR CMHC has PostgreSQL running and running well on UnixWare,
> FreeBSD and Linux. In mission critical mode.
>
> Finally, our PROGRESS database offers a 4GL that is supposed to make writing
> code easier for someone like myself: I am not a `REAL PROGRAMMER.' All of
> my formal training has been in psychiatry and social work. However, as a
> Unix-SQL-Perl ENTHUSIAST, I was assigned the task of running our network
> and the agency databases a few years ago. Thanks to the efforts of Edmund
> Mergl who wrote and maintains the marvelous DBD::Pg module that allows me to
> use Perl (via Tim Bunce's DBI module) I have found a viable replacement for
> the PROGRESS 4GL. Thus I've been able to step in, port existing PROGRESS
> code and move our applications and data to what I feel is the best SQL
> database available.
>
> North Richmond CMHC is currently integrating all of our databases (we have
> 4 postgres and one PROGRESS) into an inter-unit repository of patient data.
> This is an ambitious project, however, PostgreSQL is the tool that is making
> it possible. We invite inquiries on the process of migration to the
> best, most advanced (an example - support for arrays) open source database
> available.
>
> Thomas Good, MIS Coordinator, North Richmond CMHC
> Member: Computer Professionals For Social Responsibility
> tomg@ { admin | q8 } .nrnet.org
> Phone: 718-354-5528
> Fax: 718-354-5056
>
>

=========================================================================
Jeff MacDonald // Hub.org Networking Services // PostgreSQL INC
jeff(at)hub(dot)org // sales(at)hub(dot)org // sales(at)pgsql(dot)com
http://hub.org/~jeff // http://hub.org // http://pgsql.com
=========================================================================

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