Solaris 7 Information

I tried to build PostgreSQL 6.5.3 on a Sun Enterprise 250
server running Solaris 7 (2.7) (Hardware 11/99 release).

It took quite a bit of work, but I was finally able to
build it with Perl support (I had to abandon tcl support).
I'm using the pre-packaged Perl 5 and Tcl 8.2 from sunfreeware.com.

It looks as though postmaster is working OK (if I turn down the default number of blocks -- surprising, since I have 512 MB of RAM), but the regression tests seem to choke on the Perl module. I don't really have much more time to play with it, since I'm supposed to be evaluating several different databases for my employer. Unfortunately, ease of setup and language compatability are two of my big decision criteria.

I started out with the prepackaged Sun binary, but the documentation wasn't complete, and I couldn't get past 'initdb'. The build instructions are more helpful, but they neglect to mention that you _must_ have bison to get through the build. I think I found the answer to my 'initdb' problem later in the build instructions, but by then I had already done all the work to build it.

Anyway, it looks like a good database product, but Informix was much, much easier to install and set up (not that it was really easy, mind you). I don't think my employer is going to let me spend a whole day setting this up for each of our projects (though I definitely lean towards the free software alternative if at all possible).

Best of luck,
-Joe Porter