From: Shachar Shemesh (linux-il_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Thu 17 Jun 2004 - 17:38:03 IDT
Walking on eggshells here, as I want answers, not to deteriorate into a
flame war. Please accept any objectionable statement in this email as
assign of the author's ignorance in MySQL, rather than a disqualifying
prejudice.
Sagi Bashari wrote:
> I've been working with MySQL for few (4?) years now, partly powering
> few big israeli ecommerce websites. I only missed this feature once -
> when we needed to do on the fly currency conversion. However, we
> solved it by writing a small MySQL module in C.
Leaving the controversial license aside (more precisely, the
controversial license's interpretation by MySQL AB), it was my
understanding that MySQL was designed with speed, rather than data
integrity, in mind. As such, the most lacking feature to me is a totally
guarantee that no matter what abuse the database, database server, and
database server machine go through, my data is in a consistent state.
While I understand that this usually comes into play in the form of
features such as transactions etc., I don't understand how such features
can be retrofitted into a database. Maybe you can help shed some light
on that point for me.
> If I had to write a new application day, from scratch, I would
> probably consider postgresql again. However, your statement regarding
> mysql not being suitable for "anything more than one table website" is
> very untrue.
Again, trying hard not to troll. Can you explain why you would consider
PG for new applications if MySQL has what a db user would require?
>
> MySQL still has its advantages over postgresql (such as better
> documentation and much larger userbase, but also technical features
> like built in replication and fulltext search).
>
> Moreover, MySQL will get real i18n support and subqueries support over
> the next few months (v4.1),
When you say "real i18n support", what do you mean? What does MySQL not
support at the moment?
> and support for features like real stored procedures and cursors over
> the next year (v5)
The thing is that I'm not comfortable referring to not-yet existing
features. PostgreSQL is going to have some sort of native Windows
support in the upcoming version. It's already committed into CVS. Still,
this is not something you may necessarily want to run a production
server on. They currently focus on reliability, rather than speed, which
may result in it being faster and more efficient to run it in cygwin or
in colinux. How much will MySQL stored procedures, or for that matter,
transactions, suffer from the same symptoms?
> Sagi
To me (and please correct me if I'm wrong) it seems there is little
doubt that PostgreSQL is FAR more feature complete than MySQL. It has
had foreign keys, transactions and stored procedures for ages. Same goes
for Unicode support and cursors (readonly, I'm afraid). State of the art
(i.e. - still in development) in Postgresql currently talks about nested
transactions, checkpoints, and PITR (Point In Time Recovery), which are
likely to still be YEARS away in MySQL (ignorance disclaimer from above
applied). It has a license that is suited, without any controversy, to
both free and commercial projects. With such considerations, one has to
ask (and I do here), what are the reasons for choosing MySQL? As far as
I can see, new projects should mostly consider Postgresql vs. Firebird.
While we are on the subject, can anyone comment as to where Firebird
stands in these respects? I understand it's fairly mature, but I don't
know just how much.
Shachar
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd. http://www.lingnu.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il
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