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Re: postgre vs MySQL

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At 09:47 PM 3/11/2008, rrahul wrote:

Hi,

I am a database professional but have never used Postgre. My client was
exploring the posiblity of using Postgre instead of Mysql and wnated to know
the comments from the community.
I waned you people you post your views on the following comparision points
1] Performance
2] Scalablity
3] community support
4] Speed
5] ease of use
6] robustness

Any major clients of the two.
You can add you own points too.

The "advantage" of MySQL is it looks good on paper with all the ticks on the extensive feature list so it's easy to convince bosses to use it.

But the problem with MySQL is you often can't use all the "advertised features" at the same time, some of them are mutually exclusive.

For example, with MySQL if you want fast single user selects or insert speeds you use MyISAM tables, but if you start to need transactions or high concurrency writes you have to use InnoDB which is significantly slower.

Want to have a consistent backup of your MySQL database? For MyISAM tables you have to lock all tables till the backup is done, and that can affect performance a lot. OK so you use InnoDB. But when the time comes to _restore_a multiGB innodb table, you might find innodb a bit too slow. Worse, apparently "fun" things happen if someone halts the restore process halfway ;).

Guess what happens if you have a mix of table types.

A "solution" of course is to have multiple database servers with a master server replicating to a slave server that's used for backups, and resort to backing up stuff in on-disk format - shutdown slave and copy the files. This makes restoring faster. But after all this, MySQL stops looking so easy right?

In fact such a multi database set up just to do proper backups and restores resembles a bad implementation of Postgresql's MVCC :).

Basically with Postgresql, there's a lot less of this "If you want to use Cool Feature A, you can't have Wonderful Feature B" thing.

I did a simple mass insert test (followed by backup with pg_dump or mysqldump and restore ) and postgresql 8.1 is faster or as fast as MySQL 5.0.26 with MyISAM tables, and faster than MySQL with innodb tables- default packages from suse 10.2 with tuning done for MySQL (increase of buffers etc) but postgresql is as per suse 10.2 defaults.

I use MySQL daily at my workplace, and it's not something I recommend you use if you had a choice. In the old days (before version 6.x) postgresql wasn't good, but postgresql is way ahead now.

Lastly, the other problem with MySQL is its Innodb and BDB stuff are now owned by Oracle. While Oracle is not squeezing MySQL yet, who knows what will happen a few years later.

Regards,
Link.


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