Re: 12 Silver Bullets

On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Bob Zurek wrote:

> Anyone ever put together something I call a Silver Bullet list that
> showcases the top 12 features in PostgreSQL that could kill MySQL?

I'm not sure if it's exactly the same list you're looking for, because
many of these are more differences in priorities rather than features, but
here's my list of the top 12 reasons why I use PostgreSQL instead of MySQL
after my recent re-examination of this topic:

1. One database engine, completely integrated into core
2. Robust transactional ACID behavior under all circumstances
3. BSD License makes it unambiguously open-source
4. Aims for as close to SQL:2003 compliance as feasible
5. Developers fanatical about code quality, correctness, and testing
6. Undefined or unsupported operations never fail silently
7. MVCC always gives consistent view of your data
8. Complicated joins handled as automatically as possible
9. Designed to scale to large numbers of simultaneous read and write users
10. Transactional DDL allows safe schema changes
11. Multitude of mature server-side programming options
12. Fantastic community support ranging from users to the core team

This is of course now the content that's on the Wiki in the PG vs. MySQL
page if anyone wants to play with this list over there instead of via this
mailing list.  I've pushed the "Transactional DDL" material that was there
for a bit into a new page on techdocs which should be published shortly,
and all of the feedback and corrections to the original PG vs. MySQL page
(like the innodb tunables and the 8.1/8.2 ambiguity) have now been
incorporated.  Once all the pages make their way through techdocs, I know
I'm feeling pretty done with beating on MySQL.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD