About a month ago I was trying to help a friend out by uploading one of our earlier made PHP/Postgres project to my server so she’d be able to get screenshots she needed. Seemed like a simple task given that my hosting provider supports Postgres, NOT!
It soon became obvious that something is entirely wrong with the combination of cPanel and Postgres working together. Firstly I couldn’t access phpPgAdmin at all. With MySQL you simply click phpMyAdmin link in cPanel and you’re taken to your databases. With Postgres I was shown login screen and neither my hosting account nor database user credentials worked.
At some point later I was creating a database in cPanel and it wouldn’t show up in cPanel after you navigated from successful creation message to database management area.
At all times I couldn’t access database tables with user having all database privileges. In the end any new database created in cPanel had tables in it. And data in tables as well. Just like the data I was managed to get inearlier, but before executing any data definition and insertion statements after creating new database!
I first created a ticket about the issue on December 11th. Last reply I got is from January 7th. I’m nearly 100% sure I replied to it, but it doesn’t show up in clients system and I haven’t received a reply. The issue itself is closed probably due to me not replying.
At this point I don’t really care whether I really failed replying in terms of writing reply and then not sending it or anything similar or they hushed it up. They still couldn’t solve my issue in nearly a month. It was a fairly simple issue in the end, I simply wanted to use Postgres the same way you use MySQL. They failed to set it up properly and even after having my login credentials asked ME to verify if things were working when they were not.
I haven’t had any other issues with them so I’ll probably stay with them until I need Postgres again.
At least something good have come out of it. I learned that MySQL has VIEWS and nearly everything else our project used. I’ve been under the impression that MySQL is less capable than it turned out to be. After converting sequences to auto_increments and removing some Postgres-specific? ::casts it could execute most of the queries without any problem. I’m too lazy to try fixing some of the more complicated views and checking out how many of application queries actually work without changes, but I probably won’t be needing Postgres any time soon knowing what MySQL is capable of.
And what about the screenshots, you ask? Set up Postgres locally and made some screencasts with Wink.