Re: PostgreSQL vs MySQL

Hmm.. I think she is looking for someone to speak more toward the issues
mentioned in the article than the article itself... the items listed are
kind of vague but I'll give it a swing..

* No Data Partitioning -- just to get it out of the way, tablespaces
capabilities is planned for 7.5 (the patch is being knocked around as we
speak). There are some ways people partition there installations; os on
1 disk, wal on another, data on a third; or using symlinks on indexes
and the like, with varying degrees of success. Between that and really
big disks/raid setups you can get pretty far, certainly into the triple
digit GB range. Beyond that I'm not quite sure how people handle TB
sized databases, but those folks are out there so it must be doable.

* Large database related issues -- PostgreSQL makes an effort to work
with the OS rather than next to it, so on large databases you need to
understand your hardware and OS capabilities since that is generally
where your bottlenecks will come from and PostgreSQL is more likely to
expect you to be able to use your OS to solve problems than some of the
commercial dbs. Of course this all depends on what you consider
large... One potential issue with PostgreSQL and big databases would be
upgrades and backups, which require dumping lots of data to disk which
can be inconvenient. If I were a big company looking to switch to
postgresql, I'd think hard about using some of the money I saved in
license fee's to get in place upgrades developed.

* Non-commercial HA support -- this one is pretty vague, but if your
looking for things like replication and fail over, it is out there and I
believe it works well, but the truth is that most people don't need it
(especially given how well postgresql scales and how robust it tends to
be) so it isn't a well beaten path, but it is certainly doable.

This was brief but hopefully useful, if anyone else want's to chime in
please do. Lisa, if you have additional questions please feel free to
post them. More specifics would be good as well if possible... (expected
# of transactions, expected size of DB, number of installations, etc...)

Robert Treat

On Thu, 2004-05-20 at 13:42, Merlin Moncure wrote:
> This article was discussed in detail just recently on this list (check
> the archives)...there were some posts here by the article's author, Tim
> Conrad.
>
> Merlin
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-advocacy-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-advocacy-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of
> LSanchez(at)ameritrade(dot)com
> Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2004 11:11 AM
> To: pgsql-advocacy(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [pgsql-advocacy] PostgreSQL vs MySQL
>
> We ran across this article comparing the two-leading open-source dbms'.
> [...]
>
> art
>
>
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