Re: SQL standards in Mysql - Mailing list pgsql-sql

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 7:39 PM, Dean Gibson (DB Administrator)
<postgresql@ultimeth.com> wrote:
>  So, I went with PostgreSQL.  Why?  From the book, it was clear that
>  MySQL lacked so many features of a decent SQL DB.  In particular (at the
>  time) VIEWs and sub-selects.

Note that unless someone's done some hacking recently, mysql uses
nested loops for subselects.  Which is fine for a few dozen or hundred
entries.  not so much for 1M rows.  Handling subselects is as much
about performance as it is about convenience.  There was a time a few
years ago when oracle would beat the pants off postgresql or mysql if
you did this:

delete from tablea where id in (select id from tableb);

when tableb was pretty large.  PostgreSQL hackers fixed that issue
some time ago.  MySQL, as far as I know, has no plans to fix their
poor performance.  Because somebody checked off subselect and that's
all they needed, a check box.

>  the only one left standing (at least on my budget).  (I ran it on a
>  Pentium 233 for a year before I upgraded the hardware.)

Oh man, this takes me back. My first two postgresql servers were both
pg v6.5.3 or so and ran on:

Pentium-100 with 64 Meg of ram,
Quad CPU Sparc-20 (4x50MHz CPUs) with a stack of SCSI hard drives
running the last version of RH to support sparc back then.

>  supported by some software packages.  For example, I think phpBB is the
>  only major message board software that supports PostgreSQL (see
>  http://www.phpbb.com/about/features/compare.php ), and in fact has for
>  some time.  Of course, they have a DB abstraction layer (wow, what an
>  concept!), which allows them to easily support a number of DBs.  Of
>  course, what does that tell you about the level of design and
>  professionalism of phpBB versus the others?  Note that I have no
>  connection with the phpBB project, and in fact find many of the
>  developers arrogant.  I'm just saying that any software that doesn't
>  support a number of DBs probably wasn't designed and/or implemented
>  properly.

Well, somebody needs to teach them how this thing called patch works.
The fact that all the hacks are installed by hand makes me queezy
about messing with any modifications.

Note that w-agora is a pretty nice bbs that supports mysql, oracle,
and pgsql.  I like the interface, but it doesn't look like there's a
lot of recent development on it.  I like the fact that it uses a nice
threaded interface and can work with oracle, pgsql, or mysql.

>  Hopefully, some event in the near future will tip the scales in the
>  public perception of SQL DBs, and PostgreSQL will get better respect.

I think it's slowly happening, not one big event, but a bunch of
little experiences adding up.  I think one of the things helping that
in the long run is the number of very capable DBAs that are  slowly
coming to pgsql from other dbs, like DB2 or Oracle or Informix.