Re: Open Source Database Routs Competition in New Benchmark Tests

> Some of the comments are interesting.  One MySQL defender
> claims that the bottle neck in the benchmarks Great Bridge
> used is the ODBC drivers.  It's possible that all the test
> really shows is that MySQL has a poor ODBC driver.

Nope. If it were due to the ODBC driver, then MySQL and PostgreSQL would
not have had comparable performance in the 1-2 user case. The ODBC
driver is a per-client interface so would have no role as the number of
users goes up.

The Postgres core group were as suprised as anyone with the test
results. There was no effort to "cook the books" on the testing: afaik
GB did the testing as part of *their* evaluation of whether PostgreSQL
would be a viable product for their company. I believe that the tests
were all run on the same system, and, especially given the results, they
did go through and verify that the settings for each DB were reasonable.

The AS3AP test is a *read only test*, which should have been MySQL's
bread and butter according to their marketing literature. The shape of
that curve shows that MySQL started wheezing at about 4 users, and
tailed off rapidly after that point. The other guys barely made it out
of the starting gate :)

The thing that was the most fun about this (the PostgreSQL steering
committee got a sneak preview of the results a couple of months ago) was
that we have never made an effort to benchmark Postgres against other
databases, so we had no quantitative measurement on how we were doing.
And we are doing pretty good!
                    - Thomas