Re: PostgreSQL Advocacy, Thoughts and Comments

On Sunday 30 November 2003 05:38, Tony wrote:
> Comments within:
> Chris Travers wrote:
> >Tony <tony(at)unihost(dot)net> Wrote:
> >Agreed completely. Now we just have to sell the PostgreSQL solution.
> > Here is what the MySQL people will say (and we need good evidence to
> > counter): 1: MySQL is faster.
> >2: MySQL has more community support.
> >3: MySQL has replication as part of its core distribution. MySQL's
> >replication is better tested...
>
> 1. Let's do apples to apples, NOT apples to Oranges as has been done
> many times in the past. It would be far more useful IMHO to put
> forward a "real world" scenario (rather than purely transactions per
> second) which shows 2 examples of the same application, the first MySQL
> written with much of the logic in the code, PHP, Perl, whatever. the
> second would be written in the same language, with the appropriate use
> of the true RDBMS features in full effect. Then let's comapare
> results. I'm sure that the more we can usefully abstract to the DB the
> more performace you'll see from PG, especially as load increases. The
> big issue I've found is not raw speed, if half of the logic is in
> regexps and algorithms in the scripting, this will be many times slower
> to run than the same en DB. Although correct me if I'm way off the mark
> here. Also the point needs to be made that, it is far more trivial to
> write other interfaces to the program/application. Who wouldn't enjoy
> the ability to work on their CRM with a Python or Java frontend, without
> the need to write 75% of the logic in a different language.
>

Here's one of the more famous articles of this type which documents the switch
from mysql to postgresql by the folks at sourcforge. (and we didnt even have
to give them thousands of $$$ in development and product support like IBM...
:-)

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20001112.php3

You'll note in one test postgresql performs at 6x mysql... and this was with
version 7.1.

Another interesting note is the mention that interbase was looked at and then
passed over due, in part, to "serious community and corporate issues around
it's Open Sourceness".

Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL