Re: Article on MySQL vs. Postgres

Tim,

I'm sorry if I came off harsh in my previous comments. I'm a fervent
supporter of open-source software, and have hit massive pushback from
enterprise people because they see all the open-source sites using MySQL,
and that is outrageous to them. Although MySQL has a few, important niches
to fill, it's been used in places where I think it's hurt the credibility of
open-source web developers. I've been trying to talk to MySQL
developer/users about how we got to where we are, but with little success
(and what I've told you is by far the nastiest I've ever been in this
respect).

I hope that we can have a meaningful exchange about these issues. I'm a fan
of Postgres, but by no means a religious supporter of it. I *am* a religious
supporter of transactions, subselects, and such.

If you'd like to find out more about transactions, you can check out Philip
Greenspun's http://www.arsdigita.com/asj/aolserver/introduction-2.html which
has a paragraph about "Why Oracle?" which explains the reasons for choosing
an ACID-compliant RDBMS.

I'm also happy to write up a "why transactions are good" article.

-Ben

on 7/5/00 12:34 PM, Tim Perdue at tperdue(at)valinux(dot)com wrote:

> Thomas Lockhart wrote:
>> You mentioned a speed difference in Postgres vs MySQL. The anecdotal
>> reports are quite often in this direction, but we typically see
>> comparable or better performance with Postgres when we actually look at
>> the app or benchmark. Would it be possible to see the test case and to
>> reproduce it here?
>
> Finally a sensible reply from one of the core guys.
>
> http://www.perdue.net/benchmarks.tar.gz
>
> To switch between postgres and mysql, copy postgres.php to database.php,
> change the line of SQL with the LIMIT statement in forum.php.
>
> To move to mysql, copy mysql.php to database.php and change the line of
> SQL in forum.php
>
> No bitching about the "bad design" of the forum using recursion to show
> submessages. It can be done in memory in PHP, but I chose to hit the
> database instead. This page is a good example of one that hits the
> database hard. It's one of the worst on our site.
>
> At any rate, I wish someone would write an article that explains what
> the benefits of transactions are, and how to use them effectively in a
> web app, skipping the religious fervor surrounding pgsql vs. myql.
> There's a lot of people visiting PHPBuilder who just want to expand
> their knowledge of web development, and many of them would find that
> interesting.
>
> Tim