Re: Advantages of PostgreSQL over MySQL 5.0

On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 02:51, Gábor Farkas wrote:
> Scott Marlowe wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 12:17, Jim Nasby wrote:
> >> On Mar 22, 2006, at 10:08 PM, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> >>> Now, I shouldn't be able to insert anything in b that's not
> >>> referencing
> >>> an entry in a. and I used innodb tables. and I used ansi SQL, and I
> >>> got no errors. So how come my data's incoherent three seconds after
> >>> creating the tables the way the spec says should work? Simple. MySQL
> >>> only implements foreign keys if you do them this way:
> >
> > Yep. I filed the bug report on it.
> >
> > http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=13301
> >
>
> from the response:
>
> > Years ago, to help porting applications from other database brands to
> > MySQL, MySQL was made to accept the syntax even though no real
> > constraints were created.

> i hope postgresql will never "help" me this way.

No kidding. What bothers me so much about this failure is that there's
not way in the current version to change this behaviour. Everytime
there's a MySQL versus PostgreSQL flamefest on Slashdot or elsewhere, I
see the MySQL folks chiming in with "but the -ansi switch fixes all
those problems"

It doesn't, and there are many other things I've found that the -ansi
switch doesn't fix.

I really really really wish they'd make a version that followed the ANSI
standard more closely, then had a "-compatv4" and "-compatv3" switch to
make it behave like the older MySQL flavors.

This defaulting to running like an old version, with all its issues is
one thing that makes MySQL so unnattractive to use. That and the fact
that if you've got a problem, the standard answer nowadays is "buy a
support contract". ugh.