Big Cats & The Elephant

In my experience, it has been an exceedingly rare thing to be able to get a database up and running quickly and easily for the sole purpose of having one to play with.  Oracle is a beast to install, for example, and SQL Server loves to run you through endless wizards.  MongoDB was the notable exception to this, and this was therefore of the reasons that I first jumped on board so eagerly to give it a test drive.

But even the simplicity of downloading the MongoDB binaries for OS X and starting it up with the right flags on the command line falls short of the mind-numbingly incredible ease with which you can get PostgreSQL up and running on a Mac with Postgres.app!

What were are talking about here is

• download
• unzip
• move to Applications
• run it

No joke.  You now have PostgreSQL running on the default port of 5432.

The documentation will open by default.  I suggest adding the path to the Postgres binaries to your own PATH, and this information is provided in brief doc that will open.  This is not absolutely necessary, however, as one can start the psql shell (analogous to SQL*Plus) from the menu that will appear if you click on the small elephant that will appear in your menu bar.

While I plan to go through the steps to get Postgres started on CentOS Linux at a later date for more complex, multiserver configurations; I can't overstate how highly I recommend this for its elegant simplicity.  Many, MANY thanks to Mattt Thompson and Heroku Postgres for making this available to the masses!