Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 14:53 -0500, Chander Ganesan wrote:
> Brad Nicholson wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 11:42 +0100, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
> >
> >> Leif B. Kristensen wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>> It's hardly more difficult to start using PostgreSQL than MySQL. The
> >>> installation part is mostly the same. Regarding the query language
> >>> itself, the differences are small enough that it doesn't matter much
> >>> from a learning point of view.
> >>>
> >> The difference is that PostgreSQL does not bundle as much functionality
> >> as MySQL does. Also the simple fact that you have plenty of choices in
> >> PostgreSQL makes it harder as you grow. This is why developers recommend
> >> other developers to use MySQL. Its not only easy to setup, but it will
> >> do what most of them expect even if they grow bigger. Like replication
> >> is in there by default etc.
> >>
> >
> > Actually, I think the biggest barrier to winning over this crowd is
> > performance out of the box. MySQL just sort of "works" with the default
> > settings, and is quite fast. The default Postgres install, well, if you
> > don't tune the parameters, analyze your data, ect, the performance will
> > be poor compared to MySQL.
> >
> > I was chatting with a developer the other day who uses MySQL, and he
> > explained how he chose MySQL over Postgres. He loaded a fairly large
> > data set into both, did some querying on it, and MySQL was way faster.
> > I'm sure he didn't tune the conf file, or analyze the data, or some
> > combination of the things you need to do.
> >
> >
> That's hard to compete with. By default tables created in MySQL are
> non-transactional...and can thus operate with much less overhead . In a
> "query only" - or when you are only inserting rows in a table -
> situation, this is quite fast. As a transactional database, I'm not
> sure how well PostgreSQL could compete with that...

I certainly agree. But if that's the market people want to compete with
(I'm not implying that it is), that's and issue that needs to be
addressed. There are simple ways, like shipping with alternate
postgresql.conf files. If I remember the MySQL install procedure, I
seem to recall that you had a choice of three default conf files to
chose from.

--
Brad Nicholson 416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.