I seem to remember that import and export used to be standard fare on any application that might hold your data. To an extent, that’s still true, but it seems like it’s becoming less so — especially with web applications. In my last post, I pointed out that the import and export capabilities of Serendipity are severely lacking. If you export, and then try to import into a fresh installation, you will lose all the comments! That simply doesn’t sound like a valid import/export feature at all, and users would probably be safer if it didn’t exist. WordPress is better, and the export file gives me more confidence that it’s correct, but it’s still not without flaw: the comment threading gets completely garbled on import to a fresh install.

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I decided that I need to start posting again, it’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to write. Now I’m using WordPress, instead of Serendipity, because of the overall quality and because of the import/export capabilities (caveat: WP isn’t perfect here, either… more on this later). This decision took some consideration because, as a PostgreSQL advocate, I naturally would want to choose software that works with PostgreSQL (Serendipity does; WordPress is MySQL-only).

It got me thinking a little bit about why I like PostgreSQL, when it matters, and when it doesn’t.

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