Re: Are we losing momentum?

On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 07:51, mlw wrote:
> Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
> >
> >The real problem is PHP. PHP is just the cruftiest language ever invented
> > (trust me, I use it every day). The PHP people are totally dedicated to
> > MySQL, to the exclusion of all rational thought (eg. When I asked
> > Rasmas at a conference about race conditions in his replicated
> > setup, he replied "it's never going to happen - MySQL's replication
> > is just too fast...).
> >
> Hey! don't go knocking PHP, it is probably one of the most flexible and
> easy to use systems around. I have done several fairly large projects
> with PHP and while it is an "ugly" environment, it performs well enough,
> has a very usable extension interface, it is quick and easy to even
> large projects done.
>

The problem is the marriage of PHP and MySql. I've always held the
notion that early on several of the php developers, being windows
hackers, needed an open source database that would run on windows. They
picked mysql (which was probably their best option at the time) and
mysql rode on the shoulders php's success.

> As for MySQL, there are two things that PostgreSQL does not do, and
> probably can not do to support MySQL:
>
> (1) REPLACE INTO (I think that's the name) which does either an insert
> or update into a table depending on the existence of a row. I was told
> that this was impossible.
>
> (2) MySQL returns a value on insert which is usually usable, for instance,
> insert into mytable (x,y,z) values(1,2,3);
> select rowid from mytable where x=1 and y=2 and z=3;
>

I'm pretty sure I've seen people create db functions to duplicate these
features, but admittedly that would be more complicated.

<snip>
>
> We need to take projects like Bugzilla (Did RH ever release the PG
> version or am I way out of date?) and port them to PostgreSQL. We need
> to write free articles for Linux and IT magazines about how to take a
> MySQL project over to PostgreSQL easily, why PostgreSQL is much better
> than MySQL,

Red Hat actually did do this, and does make the source available. One
problem I found with porting of mysql apps is that those apps tend to do
a lot of dump things to make up for mysql's missing features. Unless
you really are willing to fork the code and then maintain it as a new
project, porting applications gets somewhat futile.

Robert Treat