On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:32 PM, Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
> > 3] community support
>
> It's not unheard of for someone who is really having a problem that looks
> like a database bug to get one of the core PostgreSQL contributors poking
> at their box to figure out what's going on. Meanwhile, MySQL can't even
> get enough resources together to get their new version out the door (V5.1
> has been lingering around since November of 2005), so there's little
> developer capacity to spare to help users like the support you find on the
> mailing lists here. I think if you poke around a bit you'll discover the
> MySQL community has been rather unhappy with the number of bugs in MySQL
> 5.0 and 5.1. A good intro is
> http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/04/mysql-quality-of-old-and-new-features/
An interesting point here is that because of the long delay in 5.1
some things have been attempted in 5.0 as performance enhancements
that broke things. See specifically the bug whereby with innodb an
order by DESC was actually turned into an order by ASC silently. It
was in the "production" version of 5.0 for several months if I recall
correctly.
That kind of change does NOT get into production versions of
postgresql. With a yearly release schedule, postgresql doesn't have
to put dodgy performance updates in a production release. When
something like that does happen, i.e. a bug or security fix goes
wrong, the immediate response I've seen from the pgsql hackers has
been amazingly fast.