Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

Duncan Garland wrote:
> How do you position Postgres against MySQL 5.0?
>
> MySQL is more popular but I've always regarded it as a bit lightweight. I'm
> told that this is no longer the case with 5.0. Why choose Postgres over
> MySQL 5.0?

One of the things you must realize is that they crossed off a lot of
features from the must have list. However these features are very
immature and incomplete at this point. For example subqueries are often
slow, prepared statements are not allowed for all types of queries,
their stored procedure implementation is severely lacking in
completeness. At the same time I would say that they have more trouble
with joining 5 or more tables than PostgreSQL

There are some areas where MySQL leads on the technical side. For
example they have more complete charset/collate support. Their partition
implementation in 5.1 will also be more complete than what PostgreSQL
has atm.

One of the key differences however is in the philosphie. MySQL wants to
prepackage everything to make things easy. PostgreSQL wants to provide a
flexible architecture, that people can extend with their exact needs.
You can see this differences especially with things like replication,
where MySQL bundles their solution while in the PostgreSQL ecosystem you
have a ton of choices depending on your needs.

regards,
Lukas

PS: I use MySQL for 90% of my projects.