Re: Differentiating different Open Source databases

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> 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 was escalation? He made statement should have been fleshed out
before sending and I called him on it. Given the context of his
statement (trying to publicize) I think being blunt was required.
What he said was a truncated version of what he wanted to get across.
In the full version it is valid, but the truncated version is rubbish.
Jim had made a comment about people thinking that open source
databases were not very good. Dimitri agreed with a comment about
MySQL. There is not much reading between the lines required here.

I have had to deal with having to answer questions about PG people
belittling MySQL much of time I push to use PG. It get's really old
and has hurt my attempts to use PG.

> 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.

No argument with PG being a very good platform (as I have already said
in this thread). My comments were a defense of MySQL also being a very
good platform and saying that anyone say it is not is wrong and pg
advocacy should not be pushing that viewpoint.

> 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.

Covering indexes are not needed for a big deployment, but they are
massively useful for many of the workloads that I dealt with.

> 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.

I have not tried to highlight anything in particular as a key limiter
other than competent humans. I suggested writing tutorials.

I am trying to steer the advocacy group to not hurt my advocacy.

--
Rob Wultsch
wultsch(at)gmail(dot)com