Introduction

Hey there folks,

I own a idiot box. TV - the drug of the nation

My name is Patrick Hatcher and I work for Macys.Com. My lame title is
Legacy Integration Developer. Which in a nutshell means that I obtain data
from about 3 different our mainframe systems, our NCR Teradata warehouse,
and Filemaker database (don't laugh!). I then collate this data and try to
present it as information my users. I also program in Visual Basic and
(thanks to Josh's help) Perl, and now PHP.

First off, I'll admit that until I started using Postgres, I was a die hard
Microsoft fan. It was and to some extent still is my bread and butter. I
knew little to nothing about Linux and any other DBMS systems except brand
name ones. In fact, 1.5 yrs ago, we dropped $17k on Oracle licenses and
once we installed it, I only used it to store data in a one table database.
I didn't like it and I had too many deadlines to meet to try to learn it.

I started using Postgres in Feb 2002 because my company found a fiscal
religion. I wanted my move my database from my MS SQL "development box"
that everyone in the company had been using for the past 2 years to some
other DBMS that provided similar functions. I looked at MySQL, but it
didn't provide the functionality that I needed. I found about Postgres
from a Google search and instantly got hooked. I now have it installed on
a Linux box (which I totally love now) and even a few Mac OSX boxes. My
boss is in love with me because he, like the rest of my team, is screaming
the virtues of open source.

I'm hoping to learn all I can about Postgres from the group. I'm
particularly interested in finding tweaks to boost performance from my box.
I have users in SF, NY, and Atlanta accessing data either via the intranet
or desktop applications. Since I deal with data that I dump and refresh
daily, my experience with triggers, rules and transactions are very
limited, so I hope to learn more about this also.

Patrick Hatcher
Macys.Com
Legacy Integration Developer
415-422-1610 office
HatcherPT - AIM