Re: Do I need to a driver or library?

On Jul 30, 2006, at 5:37 PM, Ashutosh wrote:

> Currently I have a windows application that deals with reading and
> writing patient information. At this moment each patient has its
> individual ascii file and I use the fread and fwrite to read and write
> files respectively. After being in existence for 6 years now, I feel
> strongly to moving towards a database option where patient information
> will reside in a database and reading and writing would be handled by
> Insert, Edit & Select statement. Our primary users are pharmacist and
> doctors who are not very computer savy.
> I am interested in using PostGreSql database. Thus, my question
> arises,
> if I used PostGreSql Database and provide it with my application will
> the user need to install any drivers at their end or do I provide
> library files along with the application to serve as postgresql
> engine.
> This is my first question on this newsgroup so if I am not explained
> the issue properly please let me know.

Generally, your application would be linked to the libpq library
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/libpq.html) which
would enable it to access PostgreSQL anywhere on the network without
installing anything except your application.

But PostgreSQL is a client/server database and the difference between
managing some ASCII files and a database server is large in terms of
setup and management. If you just need an embedded database for
single user access, something like SQLite would be a better choice
(http://sqlite.org/).

John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL