Re: Which database part 2 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 14:17, Kaarel wrote:
> This is the follow up for my post a few days ago. First I want to thank
> everybody for their great replies. I must admit that I did ask the same
> question in MySQL list and also had many replies. From their perspective
> the only thing that PostgreSQL has and MySQL does not have is more
> features. In fact here's a short summary of the ideas from MySQL list:
>
> -MySQL is simple, powerful, indestructible.

I find the indestructable part hard to believe, if for no other reason
than they have had to create their own "corruption recovery" tools. I'm
also starting to question the simple part since you have different table
types that behave completly different and are not always compatible with
one another. Add in the mix of the new mysapdbsql and things just get
worse.

> -PostgreSQL is very highly featured, but not as fast and not as rugged.

I guess I'll point to the .org domain system's conversion from oracle to
postgresql as proof to refute this. I don't remember any mysql based
proposals.

> -MySQL ran on NT with no fuss, while you needed cygwin and whatnot to
> run PostgreSQL.

this one is fair enough, though we should have native windows support in
the next version. while I don't know how well it will stand up in a
production environment, from a commercial standpoint SRA's native
windows threaded postgresql back end would seem pretty promising.

> -PostgreSQL seemed to require more administration than MySQL.

this really depends on the application, but in general is probably true.
i don't know enough about the innodb internals to know how much
maintenance they require. i would say that if the auto vacuum daemon
works as well as i hope, many of those issues will go away.

> -If you need to work with extremely large databases (multi GB) I would
> go with MySQL.  It scales to large files extremely well.

uuh... i don't get this one, since we've had what, a 4 TB database
reported.

> -There seems to be much less support for PostgreSQL than MySQL, be it
> from books or other users.

books yes. users... i couldn't say. maybe from the standpoint that if
you post a postgresql question on a php list your less likely to get
response than a mysql question. posting on the postgresql lists seems
pretty good to me though.

> -MySQL has better support, larger community and better documentation.
>

better support based on... ?

larger community...yes. larger developer community, i don't think so.

better documentation... i've heard this one go both ways, but i tend to
think our docs are pretty good.

> These are randomly orderered and posted by various MySQL list users. I
> thought it would be nice for part 2 to have PostgreSQL users comment
> these replies.
>
> I have been reading a little documentation and mail-lists from both
> sides. I noticed one interesting thing about MySQL: there are different
> table types with different properties. Why doesn't PostgreSQL have
> differently oriented/optimized table types? I found particularly
> intresting the heap table type which is being stored entirely in memory
> not on disk drive.
>

You'd have to get a specific reason from one of the hackers involved,
but i'd guess they just never had the need to break things down this
way. currently postgresql already tries to store tables in memory based
on actual usage.

> Why did SourceForge.net move from PostgreSQL to DB2?

The official reason was becuase they needed something that could scale
better than what they currently had. My personal belief is they recived
a lot of funding from IBM to make it work on DB2, which helped them sell
the sourceforge software to more corporations as well.

You might want to ask why did sourceforge migrate from mysql to
postgresql?  (Of course that answer is nicely available here:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20001112.php3?page=1)

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL