Re: Humor me: Postgresql vs. MySql (esp. licensing)

> It's my opinion that we should be using PG, because of the full ACID
> support, and the license involved. A consultant my company hired before
> bringing me in is pushing hard for MySql, citing speed and community
> support, as well as ACID support.

Does the consultant push "speed AND ACID" or "speed OR ACID"? My point
is that PostgreSQL is said to be harder to install/maintain/tune than
MySQL. I have been reading some MySQL mailing list and for what I see
there, using InnoDB tables (the only way to have foreign keys,
transactions, and row level locking for MySQL) makes MySQL slower and
adds complexity to tuning the database. See this thread for example
http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/148832 . So when someone says that
PostgreSQL without tuning is 5 times slower than MySQL retrieving the
same query, it is quite right to also say that MySQL InnoDB without
tuning is 5 times slower than MySQL MyISAM.

In my opinion you might consider MySQL only when you don't need the
features provided by PostgreSQL (and even then data consistency and
durability issues favor PostgreSQL) because if you need them, your
developers need to implement them and do extra work, spending more time
and money. It was already mentioned but I'll post this link again
http://sql-info.de/mysql/ . IMHO if you are not aware of these gotchas
they can also increase development time because some things are too
different from regular/logical behavior (or common sense if you will) of
any other database.

Kaarel