Re: [HACKERS] RE: Mysql comparison

> Moved to hackers. It's probably the best place. As to the comparison,
> I just started looking into that this mourning with a question from
> someone else - with luck we'll have something there around the 6.5 release.
> > Why don't you have a comparison with MySQL in your chart? I guess I ran
> > into MySQL first, so perhaps it's a result of my experience, but I've
> > seen MySQL as the closest thing to PostgreSQL's market as they are both
> > open source (to a certain extent) and freely available.

afaik MySQL is freely available for non-commercial use only.

> > At least do you have any idea how fast postgresql is compared to MySQL?

Since MySQL does not provide transactions, perhaps the most
fundamental *required* feature for a relational database, it may be
faster for simple queries on small databases. Since Postgres has an
optimizer, transactions, etc. it should perform better on large
queries and on complex transactions. But ymmv.

> > Also, it says that postgresql is not multithreaded--what exactly does
> > that mean? Does that mean it can only handle one query at a time? That
> > seems very strange.

... And intentionally misleading. What it means is that the MySQL
folks are providing disinformation and have no apparent interest in
doing otherwise. Since it is a commercial product, you had better be
ready for marketing BS from them.

The last time I looked, their "features comparison", labeled "Crash
Me" !, had a 5-20% error rate on the facts, and that is only for those
Postgres features I was familiar with. Who knows how correct the
comparisons are for other DBs?

Check the archives for previous discussions...

- Tom

--
Thomas Lockhart lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu
South Pasadena, California