Installation has become easier. "A GroupServer installation has a number of dependencies, which are now handled using buildout. A great many new features and interfaceimprovements have been introduced and system refactoring has resulted in performance increases of an order of magnitude or more, in various areas."

Asked why PostgreSQL had been used in preference to the more widely used and better known MySQL, OnlineGroups.Net technical director Richard Waid said at one stage MySQL was seen to be the super fast, new age RDBMS for the web while PostgreSQL was seen to be the slower, but reliable workhorse.

"MySQL gained a lot of its speed from omitting a number of features: in particular relational integrity (like foreign keys)," said Waid, an experienced developer and systems administrator. "They suffered a lot of backlash when they claimed that such things just weren't necessary, and to a lot of people (myself included) that did a lot of damage to their integrity.

"Meanwhile, PostgreSQL was plodding along, tweaking performance, adding more "enterprise" features some of which are quite spectacular, and gaining support from Red Hat, and another enterprise level start-up (EnterpriseDB)."

He said that MySQL had then realised that their reputation had taken a bit of a hit by claiming that relational integrity wasn't all that important, "and so they actually implemented it (and a number of other "missing" features)."

Waid said the net result was that PostgreSQL was now "rather quick, and supports a large number of connections, and MySQL is rather slower than it was comparably, and has a pretty good feature set. In other words, they're on a somewhat equal footing.

"When we chose PostgreSQL, MySQL were in the transition phase, adding the relational integrity features. I just didn't feel safe in choosing a technology for something mission critical that wasn't proven at the time, and I really do not like implementing relational integrity in code (I strongly believe that is a database's job).

"My general assessment is that it was a pretty safe call. While Sun now owns MySQL, PostgreSQL has also been getting its fair share of attention, and I still believe that it has the stronger technical base."