Re: Why Not MySQL?

Mitch Vincent wrote:
>
> A very, very good article. I love the comment about MySQL being a filesystem
> with an SQL interface :-)
>
> However.. I'm faced with a huge dilemma.
>
> We use PostgreSQL for a fairly large application I wrote, the database is
> still pretty small, it carries info on about 25-30,000 people and about
> 5,000 jobs. Recently we've had huge trouble with PostgreSQL -- it seems that
> every month I stump someone with the obscure things that happen to our data
> :-)

What version are you using ?

> >From corrupted indexes to corrupted system tables, it's almost always
> unrecoverable. Luckily I always have a backup to restore from and the world
> goes on... We've only recently started to notice that the backend is slowing
> down. It seems that with every additional applicant added it get
> exponentially slower... So, sadly I have to go find another backend for this
> application -- a commercial one too so we can get "commercial support"
> (yuck)..

Could you be a little more specific on your performance issues ?

The usual way to deal wih them is tuning your db structure and/or
queries or
setting backend options to use more memory for stuff or other such
things.

If there is something wrong with the structure or queries, then a
database
switch will help you very little, unless your front-end tool has some
special
support for _some_ databases and not for others.

> So, could you guys suggest some other backends I might look into?

The usual - Oracle, Interbase, Informix, DB2, Sybase, Solid

The website is usually obtained by putting www inf front and com at the
end ;)

And let us know of your results.

> I know
> it's an odd place for me to ask but the flat truth is that I think *I* am to
> blame for my Postgres troubles and even taking all of the problems into
> account I think PG is the best damn free RDBMS out there. It's functionality
> is superior to everyone else's, it's developers are no less than amazing and
> well -- I trust you guys to give me some honest opinions.. The functionality
> I need is basically what PG has.. Transactions are a must as well as some
> sort of sequence -- stability over performance but performance is very
> important too. It also needs to run native on FreeBSD..
>
> Oracle is out as we use FreeBSD and someone out there decided that they
> wouldn't support FreeBSD (in the license as well as in the code!)..

Is FreeBSD a religious issue there or can it be negotiated ?

-------------
Hannu