Re: postgre vs MySQL

On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Russell Smith wrote:

> Scott Marlowe wrote:
>> I too wait a day or two to test it on a staging server, but
>> I've never had a pgsql update blow back in my face, and I've done an
>> awful lot of them.

> So you missed 8.1.7 then or weren't using those features at the very
> least? You also didn't have the stats collector issue with 8.2.3, 8.2.4
> took quite some time to come out...PostgreSQL is not perfect, but as you
> can see by the problems with 8.1.7 the next update was released very
> very quickly.

The stats collector one made my life miserable for quite some time. But
that was all part of a major upgrade that happened to contain a
performance regression. The problem had been there since 8.2.0, and major
version releases always come with new bugs in the new features. I know I
caught it in release validation and held off upgrades until it was dealt
with.

I think what Scott was suggesting is that it's generally safe to apply
minor revision updates and expect that you'll have less bugs afterwards
than you'd have if you didn't apply the update. 8.1.7 was out for only
two days before the 8.1.8 fix came out; only the most aggressive upgrade
plan would have been bit by that.

If you look at the link I passed along before, you'll see the difference
with MySQL is that they've been abusing their customers with minor point
releases that try to add new features. Instead some of these introduce
functional regressions, which often hang around for a whole long longer
than two days after being noticed (this isn't even considering the delays
before those fixes make their way back into the open source product, some
only even go to paying customers). Sure, the PG stats bug was around for
five months before correction, but it was just a performance issue that
only showed up under limited circumstances and once it was reported it got
squashed fairly quickly.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD