Re: Interesting Benchmark Article

Howard Cole wrote:
> Postgres comes out on top for most of the benchmarks against MySQL and
> SQL Server, in fact in the authors original article he goes as far as
> recommending using Postgres. More interestingly, the article seems to
> indicate that W2K8 server is faster for postgres than Linux in many of
> the scenarios.
I wouldn't go that far. The numbers are all really close for the
PostgreSQL results, and his results don't deserve nearly as many
significant digits as shown on his spreadsheet. And the PHP
implementation used has more impact on results in some cases than the OS
change. For all we know the entirety of the difference relates to, say,
the quality of the PostgreSQL PHP driver on the two platforms. There's
not enough data here to prove anything beyond "for this simple PHP test,
PostgreSQL performs the same on Windows and Linux, MySQL matches the
Linux results, and MySQL lags far behind any of those on Win Server
2008." Which is, again, not necessarily a statement about MySQL
performance vs. PostgreSQL performance at all--for all we know it's
because the MySQL PHP driver is garbage.

> Note that the linux version they were comparing was Ubuntu - which I
> know from personal experience has very poor default settings for
> shared_buffers due to Ubuntu's operating system defaults. Perhaps if
> theses parameters were altered postgres would get a clean sweep.
The parameters are no better on a default Windows install.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com