I am already aware of this issue, and am preparing to explain it to people.
Having said that, if it were possible to set up a reasonably average database, with a test application that hits it with a reasonable mix of select, insert, and update operations, and run it one at a time against different RDBMSs on the same machine, then it might yield some simple numbers that could be quoted to people in case they asked.
The goal is not to absolutely determine which is fastest in the made-up scenario, I don’t think anyone cares. However it would be interesting to see if the different RDBMSs came in within a reasonable percentage of each other.
An analogy would be BogoMIPS. Nobody takes it that seriously because they know there are numerous factors that affect how a machine runs under different applications. But as a quick sanity check BogoMIPS can be useful at times.
-Will
From: pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of John Cheng
Sent: 19 March 2009 17:27
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Is there a meaningful benchmark?
Comparison between MySQL using the MyISAM engine with PostgreSQL is really not sensible. For one, the MyISAM engine does not have transaction and foreign key support, while PostgreSQL supports transaction and foreign key. Would anyone really give up transaction and integrity for slightly more performance?
