Freelance web design - CHAPTER 24 INTRODUCING POSTGRESQL The National Weather
CHAPTER 24 INTRODUCING POSTGRESQL The National Weather Service The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration s (NOAA) National Weather Service (http://weather.gov) is another one of those backbone service providers that people rely on every day. It is responsible for providing weather information and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States and its surrounding areas, providing services to both private and public organizations throughout the world. One of the key areas where PostgreSQL is having an impact is the new Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS), described at http:// www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/icwf/IFPS_WebPages/indexIFPS.html. This system integrates data from the Doppler radar, surface, and hydrology systems to build detailed localized forecast models. Once the project is fully operational, NOAA expects more than 150 PostgreSQL servers will be in service. WhitePages.com WhitePages.com started up as a hobby site back in the heady dot-com days of 1996. Today, it is one of the Internet s busiest Web sites, handling more than 2 million hits a day on the WhitePages.com site, and more than 8 million hits a day across its network, powering sites like 411.com, Verizon s superpages.com, and the White Pages section of MSN. Even though WhitePages.com had been using both Oracle and MySQL, when it came time to move its core directories in-house, it turned to PostgreSQL. Because WhitePages.com needs to combine large sets of data from multiple sources, PostgreSQL s ability to load and index data at an extremely high rate was a key to its decision to use PostgreSQL. Since then, WhitePages.com s databases have grown to over 375GB, with tables exceeding more than 250 million rows. PostgreSQL has become a very big part of the WhitePages.com network. Summary From humble beginnings in academia to some of the most crucial projects around the globe, PostgreSQL has come a long way since its university days. In this chapter, we have looked at PostgreSQL s history and where it stands today. We also touched upon just a few of the thousands of companies that are making PostgreSQL an integral part of their enterprise solutions. In the following chapters, we ll further acquaint you with many of PostgreSQL s basic topics, covering the installation and configuration process, several PostgreSQL clients, table structures, and security features. If you re new to PostgreSQL, this material will prove invaluable for getting up to speed regarding the basic features and behavior of this powerful database server. If you re already quite familiar with PostgreSQL, we still suggest that you browse through the material; at the very least, it should serve as a valuable reference.
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