Re: Which database part 2

On Fri, 2003-06-13 at 14:17, Kaarel wrote:
> This is the follow up for my post a few days ago. First I want to thank
> everybody for their great replies. I must admit that I did ask the same
> question in MySQL list and also had many replies. From their perspective
> the only thing that PostgreSQL has and MySQL does not have is more
> features. In fact here's a short summary of the ideas from MySQL list:

Thanks for the note about what the list said. It's always interesting
to read the opinion others have about a product.

> -MySQL is simple, powerful, indestructible.

Agreed, until it does destroy itself (power failure will do it).

> -PostgreSQL is very highly featured, but not as fast and not as rugged.

Agreed on speed point for simple queries (single table, indexed, low
concurrency, 99% read requests). PostgreSQL had stability issues 4+
years ago.

> -PostgreSQL seemed to require more administration than MySQL.

This is true if the system is running perfectly. Personal experience
has shown that both can be ignored if they're running well, and both
have aches and pains if something goes wrong (bad hardware). PostgreSQL
can handle some failure scenarios better than MySQL (power failure).

MySQL will continue to run in an extremely low resource scenario. This
can be a blessing (websites storing a blog or comment database) as you
may not miss the data when it goes disappears.

> -If you need to work with extremely large databases (multi GB) I would
> go with MySQL. It scales to large files extremely well.

Multi-GB is what goes for large these days? Very well, PostgreSQL
supports extremely large databases very easily. Main limits are
generally disk I/O, but that has little to do with the database. Don't
forget to tweak configuration settings and buy appropriate hardware.
Neither database functions well on a busy multigigabyte database with a
Palm Pilot for hardware.

I'm not sure I follow the large file remark. What does a large file have
to do with table or database size? Isn't it up to the filesystem to deal
well with large files?

--
Rod Taylor <rbt(at)rbt(dot)ca>

PGP Key: http://www.rbt.ca/rbtpub.asc