Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

Brad Nicholson wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 11:42 +0100, Lukas Kahwe Smith wrote:
>
>> Leif B. Kristensen wrote:
>>
>>
>>> It's hardly more difficult to start using PostgreSQL than MySQL. The
>>> installation part is mostly the same. Regarding the query language
>>> itself, the differences are small enough that it doesn't matter much
>>> from a learning point of view.
>>>
>> The difference is that PostgreSQL does not bundle as much functionality
>> as MySQL does. Also the simple fact that you have plenty of choices in
>> PostgreSQL makes it harder as you grow. This is why developers recommend
>> other developers to use MySQL. Its not only easy to setup, but it will
>> do what most of them expect even if they grow bigger. Like replication
>> is in there by default etc.
>>
>
> Actually, I think the biggest barrier to winning over this crowd is
> performance out of the box.  MySQL just sort of "works" with the default
> settings, and is quite fast.  The default Postgres install, well, if you
> don't tune the parameters, analyze your data, ect, the performance will
> be poor compared to MySQL.
>
> I was chatting with a developer the other day who uses MySQL, and he
> explained how he chose MySQL over Postgres.  He loaded a fairly large
> data set into both, did some querying on it, and MySQL was way faster.
> I'm sure he didn't tune the conf file, or analyze the data, or some
> combination of the things you need to do.
>
>
That's hard to compete with.  By default tables created in MySQL are
non-transactional...and can thus operate with much less overhead .  In a
"query only" - or when you are only inserting rows in a table -
situation, this is quite fast.  As a transactional database, I'm not
sure how well PostgreSQL could compete with that...

--
Chander Ganesan
The Open Technology Group
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