Re: MySQL's (false?) claims... (was: Re: PL/java?) - Mailing list pgsql-general

At 03:21 PM 8/26/01 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>* There are far moore books in print on MySQL than on PostgreSQL.
>O'Reilly, Sams, Que, and New Riders are all major publishers with books
>about MySQL.
>
>=> MySQL is so hard to understand and poorly documented, a plethora of
>books had to come out before anyone could use it.

I disagree. MySQL was quite easy to understand (furthermore it was limited
in what it could do :) ).  And it's well documented. The limitations were
documented too - that part I liked very much. As for the justifications for
their limitations, some valid and the rest not that important to me -
ignorable.

I found postgresql harder to understand when I first tried it (Postgres95).
And performance was terrible then, so I had to revert to MySQL.

Then there were these adhoc pgsql commands you run from the command shell
which didn't work for me (createdb etc). I had turned on access controls in
pg_hba which broke most of the command shell scripts which assumed no
access controls, and the PGSQL documentation assumed that most people would
use the command shell scripts/programs...

>* MySQL has internal support for text search. See section 6.8 MySQL
>Full-text Search.
>
>=> PostgreSQL has a number of different full text search solutions
>available, or users can plug in their own.

Yah, I hope you realised you used a similar argument against MySQL for
their many APIs :).

>* You can access many databases from the same connection (depending of
>course on your privileges).
>
>=> PostgreSQL does not allow you to access more than one database per
>connection.  This makes the system much safer and allows for more robust
>design.

How does that makes things safer etc etc? I believe that this is a genuine
limitation.

I hope the developers are honest why this limitation exists. There are
probably valid and good reasons for this limitation but I don't think
"safer and more robust" is a good one. If it really is, then it reduces my
confidence level in Postgresql's access control design/internals.

>* MySQL has a much more sophisticated privilege system than PostgreSQL.
>
>=> MySQL has a much more complicated privilege system than PostgreSQL.

Just different to me.

>* Tools to repair and optimize MyISAM tables (the most common MySQL table
>type).
>
>=> In MySQL you have to repair your tables manually if corruption occurs.
>PostgreSQL is coded so that corruption cannot occur.

I sure hope so.

But I also hope that people look at things objectively and not blind
themselves in defense of what they hold dear.

Taking a long view of things, MySQL is likely to have some design and usage
issues with the multiple ways of handling what they call transactions. They
may have to do some pruning soon and leave only the good branches.

Postgresql is better for what I currently need to do. I'm glad it has
improved a lot.

Cheerio,
Link.