Re: Why is MySQL more chosen over PostgreSQL?

On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Curt Sampson wrote:
> > I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
> > offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
> > to come up with anything.
>
> We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
> ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.

Ah, all the more reason to remove it, then! :-)

But really, please don't take that as a criticism of the current development
direction; I know it was inherited, and it's not new code. In fact, I think
it probably wasn't until _The Third Manifsto_ came out in 1998 that it
really became clear that table inheritance was not terribly useful--if it's
even generally known now. And even so, I'm open to other opinions on that,
since it's not been an intensive area of study by any means.

> > All that said, though, don't take this as any kind of a dismissal of
> > postgres. It's in most ways better than MySQL and also some commericial
> > systems, and many of its failures are being addressed. Postgres for some
> > reason seems to attract some really, really smart people to work on it.
> > If I could see something better, I'd be there. But I don't.
>
> Interbase/Firebird maybe? They just came out with a 1.0 release in March.

Once in a while I go back to it, but I still can't build the darn thing
from scratch. Which makes it a bit difficult to evaluate....

> As for why PostgreSQL is less popular than MySQL, I think it is all
> momentum from 1996 when MySQL worked and we sometimes crashed.

Right. I have a lot of hope. After all, MySQL was for a couple of
years a second-runner to mSQL, remember?

cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC