Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0 - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Quoth johncwang@gmail.com ("John Wang"):

> Right now I typically look at the comparison as PostgreSQL isn't
> proven to scale as well as MySQL for Web 2.0 type community
> sites. It seems like all Alexa 100 sites that use a OSS database use
> MySQL (many of them on InnoDB). I've also seen an old eWeek
> performance test run where Oracle and MySQL compare well from a
> scalability perspective but MSSQL doesn't (Pg wasn't tested). In
> that case, MySQL, not Pg, was being compared against Oracle and
> MSSQL. I haven't found a single Alexa 100 site that runs PostgreSQL
> yet.  If the Pg community doesn't want to compare itself against
> MySQL, is the implicit recommendation that community type sites
> planning for growth should use MySQL? That's fine if it is. I'm just
> curious.

That conclusion seems entirely opposite to the usual perspective that
comes out on scalability.

- MySQL(tm), with MyISAM, simply can't scale past ~ 10 heavily updating
  users, table locking being a prohibitively troublesome problem

- MySQL(tm) with InnoDB(tm) seems likely to be a performance loss, as
  compared to MyISAM, for small installations, but likely goes
  further, in terms of being able to scale to larger numbers of
  concurrent updates.

  It's probably comparable to older versions of PostgreSQL in that
  fashion.  Jan Wieck did some benchmarking on a TPC-W-like test that
  showed that there weren't material differences between InnoDB and
  PostgreSQL for moderate loads.

- It's on PostgreSQL where people are finding it worthwhile to head
  to much heavier levels of "scalability," where we're deploying
  many-CPU heavy iron boxes alongside disk array technology.

"Web 2.0" strikes me as being fairly much a nonsequitor in all of
this.  "Web 2.0" applications are ones whose purpose is to integrate
information from various web services.  So, if you get an address, you
send a request to Google Maps to get location information and such.
There's NO database work involved in that.