Matt,
> I understand that Postgres has been closing the speed gap with MySQL,
> but I'm having trouble finding hard data on this. What specific
> information is available in this area?
We don't have anything hard. Currently, OSDL is working on pseudo-TPC
benchmarks for us, but that's some months of testing off. Also, it's likely
that both we and MySQL will soon have a second crack at getting OSDB
benchmarks to actually work. But nothing's in print yet. Amusingly,
though, we generally do pretty well on MySQL's "Crash Me" test -- you can see
their docs for details.
One thing I will tell you up front: PostgreSQL can be very fast but requires
significant tuning and some knowledge of the query internals. In that way,
we are very like Oracle. MySQL does not require this, but also is far more
limited in SQL support, and is not ACID-compliant, and is somewhat more
limited in scalability.
So it depends on what you need. If ACID compliance, stored procedures,
SQL-standard compliance, and correlated subselects are not on your list of
needs, then going with MySQL might be the best option for you, just becuase
it will save you the tuning headaches. If you need those things, though,
then join the PGSQL-PERFORMANCE list and we'll help you tune your PostgreSQL
database for testing.
I can say that a lot of organizations have migrated from Oracle to PostgreSQL
and been pleased with the result.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco
