A lot of exciting things have happened on NICAR's web site in the last few months. But probably the most exciting thing isn't a web page we've put up, although there have been plenty of those. The most exciting thing to hit our web site has been the addition of a free relational database manager called Postgres95 to serve as a backend SQL server.
What's the difference between Postgres95 and FoxPro or Access? While there are many similarities - such as the ability to import and export data, store datasets in tables and run SQL queries to ask questions of the data - there are also some big differences.
Access and FoxPro are geared more toward the PC database user, while Postgres95 is more for a multi-user environment such as the UNIX operating system. Relational Database Management Systems such as Postgres95 (or its commercial cousins Oracle, SyBase and Informix) allow several hundred (or even several thousand) users to work with and manipulate the same datasets at the same time.
This distinction has some real advantages over single-user systems such as FoxPro, particularly when it comes to interfacing databases to a WWW front-end. The multi-user functionality of an RDBMS is ideal for a busy web site, where several users may need to access the data at once.
If you'd like to see the power of Postgres95 at work on our web site, check out such things as the IRE Morgue Online, located at http://www.ire.org/resource/morgue.htm)
We'll be back next month with more news about the latest developments on our web site.
Wallace Winfrey can be reached at (573) 884-7321, or send e-mail to wally@nicar.org