Re: Open Source Database Routs Competition in New Benchmark Tests

Kaare Rasmussen <kar(at)webline(dot)dk> wrote:

> I think a bit of explanation is required for this story:
>
> http://www.newsalert.com/bin/story?StoryId=CozDUWbKbytiXnZy&FQ=Linux&Nav=na-search-&StoryTitle=Linux
>
> Up until now, the MySQL people have been boasting performance as the
> product's great advantage. Now this contradicts thi sfor the first time. I
> believe it has to do with the test. Perhaps MySQL is faster when you just
> do one simple SELECT * FROM table, and that it has never really been
> tested in a real-life (or as close as possible) environment?

I wouldn't say that this is exactly the first time we've heard
about problems with MySQL's famed "speed". Take the Tim Perdue
article that came out a while back:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3?page=1

The most interesting thing about my test results was to
see how much of a load Postgres could withstand before
giving any errors. In fact, Postgres seemed to scale 3
times higher than MySQL before giving any errors at
all. MySQL begins collapsing at about 40-50 concurrent
connections, whereas Postgres handily scaled to 120
before balking. My guess is, that Postgres could have
gone far past 120 connections with enough memory and CPU.

On the surface, this can appear to be a huge win for
Postgres, but if you look at the results in more detail,
you'll see that Postgres took up to 2-3 times longer to
generate each page, so it needs to scale 2-3 times higher
just to break even with MySQL. So in terms of max numbers
of pages generated concurrently without giving errors,
it's pretty much a dead heat between the two
databases. In terms of generating one page at a time,
MySQL does it up to 2-3 times faster.

As written, this not exactly slanted toward postgresql, but
you could easily rephrase this as "MySQL is fast, but not
under heavy load. When heavily loaded, it degrades much
faster than Postgresql, and they're both roughly the same
speed, despite the fact that postgresql is doing more
(transaction processing, etc.)."

This story has made slashdot:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/08/14/2128237&amp;mode=nested

Some of the comments are interesting. One MySQL defender
claims that the bottle neck in the benchmarks Great Bridge
used is the ODBC drivers. It's possible that all the test
really shows is that MySQL has a poor ODBC driver.