Re: Differentiating different Open Source databases

Rob Wultsch wrote:
> The point of what I said was to make it very clear that Dimitri is
> wrong. Saying MySQL sucks is not productive at all.
>

I'm not sure where this escalation of hostility came from, but it's not
really helping. Attributing comments to Dimitri that he didn't say,
along with kicking around a strawman you built of them, is
intellectually dishonest too you know.

There is a large enough list of things PostgreSQL is really good for,
where neither MySQL nor Oracle are effective competitors, to justify the
"only get so far" comment you read way too much into; they're just not
your use cases. Some of the GIS workloads we're seeing nowadays are
good examples. And comparisons using the NoSQL problem space will
always be absent of any cases where the ability to execute complicated
queries is the main challenge. I spend an order of magnitude more time
fighting >5 table join issues than I do any of the things you mentioned
optimizing for.

There are of course some challenges to PostgreSQL deployments in the
areas you specialize in too, where there are significant advantages
advocating for MySQL instead. I'm not sure why you're so hung up on
covering indexes as one of the key parts of that; those are nice but far
from essential. The scale of Heroku's PostgreSQL deployments seems
accelerating toward the sort of size you're suggesting hasn't been
achieved yet. From the information they've shared about that, I'm
seeing a pretty different of issues than the ones you were highlighting
as key limiters. I'd rather talk about what successful deployments are
using and fighting rather than bashing PostgreSQL use cases in the more
abstract way. For a while now, large farms of PostgreSQL has been only
a theorized problem only because a popular enough app compatible with it
wasn't available yet. Heroku seems to have that with their Rails
hosting, and scaling up the database instance set has just taken the
normal sort of database operations work to accomplish.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us