Re: DBMS Engines and Performance

In response to Ron Johnson <ron(dot)l(dot)johnson(at)cox(dot)net>:
>
> On 01/30/07 14:50, Rich Shepard wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Mark Walker wrote:
> >
> [snip]
> > At last year's at O'Reilly's OSCON here in Portland I had this discussion
> > with the booth babes sales droids from Sugar-CRM. They said that they heard
> > numerous requests for postgres support but the decision-makers in the
> > company were not interested in accommodating that segment of the market. So
> > this is not an isolated instance.
> >
> > At the risk of going off the topic (but I won't respond on the list to
> > any
> > such posts), this attitude does not surprise me. It continues to disappoint
> > me, but I've seen too many poorly managed companies to be surprised any
> > longer. Across many industries I wonder why some companies manage to have
> > survived as long as they have.
>
> The company might not have the resources to maintain 2 backends, or
> modify the whole system so that it is backend neutral. Maybe they
> use lots of MySQL-specific features that would make re-engineering
> it an arduous/imposible/expensive task, and thus not feasible.

An interesting twist to this is that if you write your system to use
PostgreSQL as the backend, you quickly start taking advantage of all the
cool features that PostgreSQL has. This makes your coding easier, and your
life easier, but badly breaks any compatibility with any other database.

In my experience, it's easy to convert MySQL apps to run under Postgres --
it's very difficult to convert Postgres apps to MySQL, because MySQL just
doesn't have the required features.

--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.