Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

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.

--
Brad Nicholson 416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.