Re: Justifying a PG over MySQL approach to a project

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Ron Mayer
<rm_pg(at)cheapcomplexdevices(dot)com> wrote:
> Lincoln Yeoh wrote:
>> Ten or so years ago MySQL was better than Postgres95, and it would have
>> been easy to justify using MySQL over Postgres95 (which was really slow
>> and had a fair number of bugs). But Postgresql is much better than MySQL
>> now. That's just my opinion of course.
>
> Really?!?
>
> MySQL development started in '94; and their first internal release was May 95.[1]
>
> At that time Postgres's SQL language support was new, but didn't the underlying
> database already have a half decade of history that surely was more mature
> than MySQL at the time?

For a long time, postgres had a lot of issues that made it less
suitable for high web environments, especially 24x7 high load. vacuum
was a nightmare, transaction overhead was very high, and the complex
disk format made upgrades a real pain (only this last issue remains).
The postgresql optimizer has always had an edge, but it wasn't so cut
and dry back then. It was only with the 8.x versions that postgres
really started pulling away.

merlin