postgres documentation

[Dean Gibson]

On 2012-06-14 19:45, Robert Steinberg wrote:
> Can someone point me to the documentation for setting up postgres with GnuCash?    In the GnuCash guide, the only reference to postgres I can find says to go to File ->  Save As to save to a database.  However, when I do that, the only options are xml and sqllite, and the window that pops up doesn't look like the one in the manual.
>
> Thanks, Robert

While I don't recall exactly how I did it, that's what I initially did, 
having run a set of PostgreSQL servers for about a decade.  After all, 
that was one of the reasons I switched to GnuCash, to have a DB-based 
accounting system.

However, I soon discovered that this was not the best idea, given the 
current state of GnuCash.  In any database system, you want both 
crash/corruption protection (in the form of full backups), and 
incremental transaction protection (in the form of a transaction log).  
The current version of GnuCash does not make incremental changes to the 
DB contents;  it just replaces them wholesale on a save.  That's not 
really what I want to happen in my database, which provides only the 
first type of protection (as used by GnuCash).

GnuCash does create separate transaction logs as files.  So, I decided 
that there was not much merit (other than perhaps data portability) from 
using PostgreSQL, and I went to the GnuCash default method of creating 
compressed .xml files.

Hopefully, a true transaction-based use of PostgreSQL is coming, but in 
the meantime, I think the compressed .xml files are fine.