CF8 PostgreSQL support is Enterprise only?

Posted By : Dan Wilson June 14, 2007 2:12 PM

Update: This post is no longer true. The documentation has been updated to reflect the inclusion of PostgreSQL in the standard edition of ColdFusion. See the comments for Steven Erat's response.

While the specs are not fully complete, Damon Cooper has released the system requirements for the impending CF8 release. I thank the entire CF team and Adobe for their transparency.

From the document, it appears that support for several databases will be only for CF8 Enterprise edition. This is not completely out of the norm as the Enterprise edition of CF has had improved Oracle drivers for a long time. If anyone has ever had to purchase 3rd party Oracle drivers, (Merant, anyone?) they are expensive and certainly make sense in the Enterprise edition. What surprised me was PostgreSQL support made the Enterprise list, but not the Professional list.

The PostgreSQL JDBC drivers are available for download at no charge. The implementation is Type 4, pure java implementation. The license for the drivers (taken from the http://jdbc.postgresql.org/ site:

view plain print about

1The PostgreSQL JDBC driver is distributed under the BSD license, same as the server. The simplest explanation of the licensing terms is that you can do whatever you want with the product and source code as long as you don't claim you wrote it or sue us.

While I completely understand, and embrace, inclusion of expensive licensed drivers, (such as Oracle) in CF Enterprise only, I find the decision to include PostgreSQL JDBC drivers in CF Enterprise very surprising.

The good news is, adding the PostgreSQL drivers to a CF Pro installation is very easy. I often consult the most excellent tutorial by Joachem Van Dieten for the JDBC JAR file installation and datasource configuration

As stated in the paper, the material is subject to change. Let's hope they do.

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