Re: Postgres on shared network drive

[Craig Ringer <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

J Ottery wrote:
> Thanks so much Craig. I have decided to migrate to Postgres and most 
> of my applications are single computer based but I need to plan for 
> future needs. Some research is in order for me.

All you should need to do is allow the user / administrator to configure 
the connection settings for the application. An initial single user 
deployment can be done by installing the PostgreSQL server on the same 
computer as the program(s) that use it and having the application 
default to connecting to a database on "localhost". If you need to go 
multi-user, you can either move the postgresql server to a separate 
server computer and update the application settings to have them all 
connect to the server computer, or you can just have the additional 
users connect to the postgresql server on the first person's computer. 
In either case no changes to the application code should be required; 
you should only need to change the server hostname setting.

Your application doesn't necessarily have to care where the database 
server is. If you use something like ODBC then your data source 
definition specifies where the DB server is, and the app just asks to 
open the data source. The app won't even be able to tell if the DB 
server is on the same computer or not.

If you explicitly connect to the DB in your program code then all you 
need to do is provide a way to change the database connection settings 
in the application GUI or in a configuration file, so the user can enter 
the database server hostname, server port, database username, and 
database password.

--
Craig Ringer