[ic] postgres vs mysql (fwd)

[Michael Widenius]

Hi!

I was forwarded the following mail from the interchange-users mailing list.

Ragen> Troy,

Ragen> If I remember correctly, mySQL is a duplicated effort related to postgres.
Ragen> That being said, mySQL will be discontinued at some point in time.
Ragen> Hopefully this tidbit will help your decision.

Ragen> Ragen

>> I've already gotten one persons opinion who I trust, but I'm wondering
>> what
>> the rest of you think.
>> What do you think about running postgress vs mysql and how difficult would
>> it be to change from Mysql to postgress.
>> What kind of problems with IC might I run into?
>> My Dist is RH 6.2 Pro (modified)
>> Troy

I just wanted to point at the MySQL development is going better then
ever. Our development has during the last year grown from 2 1/2 to 8
people and we have also got a much bigger market penetration during
this time.  In all users votes we have seen MySQL, has been the voted
to be be the the most used open source database!

In other words, I really wonder what you base your conclusion on,
when you have clearly no clue what is going on.

We just released the next release version of MySQL, 3.23 and it has a
lot of new major features.  It's true that we don't have all features
that PostgreSQL has, but it's also true that PostgreSQL doesn't have
all the features that MySQL has.

MySQL does however have the benefit that you can run with and without
transactions and gives the application the possibility to decide
between speed or safety.

We have also benchmarked PostgreSQL 7.0 and even if they have improved
a lot of things, the are still VERY slow compared to MySQL in most
cases.  You can find a comparison at:

http://www.mysql.com/information/benchmark-results/result-mysql,pg.html

(We did also try to benchmark 7.1, but run into problems while doing
this so we are waiting for a new PostgreSQL release before trying to
do this again)

We know that some recent published comparisons between MySQL and
PostgreSQL has given better results for PostgreSQL for some types of
queries when done by multiple threads, but we haven't seen a single
repeatable one where they have used a late MySQL 3.23 version and a
up to date operating system.

For many of the applications MySQL is used today, PostgreSQL is in
practice way too slow!  I also know of situations where PostgreSQL is
faster than MySQL, but this is a little beside the point;  The simple
truth is that there is a need for many different databases and neither
MySQL nor PostgreSQL can be best for all of these.

Regards,
Monty