Re: Justifying a PG over MySQL approach to a project

Gauthier, Dave wrote on 16.12.2009 22:02:
> Hi Everyone:
>
> Tomorrow, I will need to present to a group of managers (who know
> nothing about DBs) why I chose to use PG over MySQL in a project,

What kind of project is that?

If you are developing something that you are selling to other people, MySQL's GPL license will force you to buy a commercial license in order to distribute your application unless it is GPL as well.

You don't have such constraints with PostgreSQL

There are some features that you might want to mention as well

- ANSI standard windowing functions
- ANSI standard common table expressions
- XML support (not necessarily important, but can potentially be nice)

Something that drives me nuts with MySQL: it behaves differently depending on the configuration settings, different defaults with different OS (regarding case sensitivity for example) or the default storage engine selected (thinking about ANSI mode, strict tables, the ability to store invalid dates, insert 0 instead of null and all those little things...).

That makes the QA for a project much more complicated, especially if you don't have control over the installation at the customer's site

PostgreSQL behaves the same ("syntactically"), regardless on where or how it was installed

Thomas