Re: Portable Postgres?

On Sep 13, 2006, at 5:47 PM, Brian Ghidinelli wrote:

>
> David Fetter wrote:
>> How about using a LiveCD with PostgreSQL included?
>
> That's an option - although I prefer the USB stick (or ipod) for
> size and durability.
>
>> Also, could you clarify a bit what you'd be trying to do with it, and
>> what restrictions the soluation needs to take into account?
>
> Personally, I'm going to be travelling for six months and I'm
> trying to see if I can replace a laptop with a complete local
> development environment on a USB drive. I would use the drive at
> Internet cafes (Win 2k, XP usually) to fix some code if needed
> while on the road. I can't rely on connecting to a pg server over
> the wire because the connections may be painfully slow.

I don't know what the current lifetime of flash is, but I suspect
that putting data (as opposed to OS or binaries) on it might be
painful, both in terms of write speed and the flash drive dying. You
could rely on copying the data onto the host PC before using it, or
something, but it might start getting complicated.

But you can get some very, very small USB hard drives - Hitachi have
a 4 gig drive that's less than an ounce and a half - which might be
more usable than trying to get it on flash. You could even load a
vmware appliance onto it and have a fair bit of your full development
environment available, and that wouldn't need any clever
configuration of postgresql.

Cheers,
Steve