Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

John Wang wrote:

> Also my statement "It seems like all Alexa 100 sites that use a OSS
> database use MySQL" isn't wrong b/c Sourceforge isn't mentioned on those
> two Pg site pages and the others are closet users. Now I can say it
> seems like only 1 Alexa 100 site uses OSS if I can find some
> confirmation from them. If Sourceforge really is using Pg in a big way,
> it would be great if we can get the Sourceforge folks to give a
> presentation on their Pg deployment and scaling at some conference. I'd
> be for supporting that.

The problem with many of the successful Web 2.0 companies is that they
lack a dedicated DBA at the very start. Actually I just claim this, I do
not have hard facts to back up that claim, but it sounded like that from
stuff I have read about the early days of many of these projects. If you
do not have a dedicated DBA you are much better off with MySQL in most
cases, because its simple .. there are few choices to make and you get
decent performance. Developers also often do not see the point in
letting the database manage the data integrity.

Now on projects where they do have a dedicated DBA, who does think that
data integrity is the job of the database, that does have the expertise
to figure out what replication method best fits the needs of the project
etc. there PostgreSQL makes absolute sense.

The problem is that MySQL has gotten to many case studies with press
coverage, that people start to think that MySQL is the better database
product regardless if you have a DBA or not. And this is something that
can only be countered with similar press coverage. Like every web
developer needs to know that SourceForge runs on PostgreSQL eventhough
they could be running on DB2 if they wanted to.

regards,
Lukas