Re: Slashdot discussion

> I think most people are of the opinion that each too is good to fit a
> certain niche. Without wanting to starta thread war I think postgres is
> great, but for many people the learning curve is too great and thus
> MySQL is a good introduction.

I'm curious about this.  For me PostgreSQL was easy to build, it was
trivially easy to create a non-superuser user account (important when
just learning!), and the online documentation is both easy to follow
and is in nice small pages.  Bruce's book helps too, of course.

In contrast, MySQL is a right pain to build at least on a low end
non-Linux system, and to create a non-superuser account involves
ridiculous amounts of study of the permissions model MySQL uses.

After surmounting those challenges I still find the MySQL
documentation difficult and it isn't helped by being in such large
HTML pages.  (I see in another response someone else found this the
other way around though!)

Finally, PostgreSQL offers features that are a real boon to my
application such as referential integrity and transactions.  I'm sold.
(I'll even finish the error logging code I promised Real Soon Now;
stuff happened but I'm back on it.)

Regards,

Giles

P.S. My tolerance is negligible for anything that goes "beep" the way
mysql insists on doing when giving error messages.  Like anyone needs
that when they're trying to figure out SQL syntax!  Having to figure
out SQL syntax is pennance enough, surely ...