PostgreSQL vs MySQL?

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

It depends on what you want to do.

MySQL is convenient (and usually available) for tasks that
are unlikely to generate much load. It's probably more
widely deployed than Postgres.

I notice O'Reilly now have a Postgres book, the quality of
doco is a big reason why I get people to use MySQL for
quickies, I can give them a book and tell them to go away.
Chances are they can grep Google for example code.
Postgres is a bit more opaque (at least to start with).

Antti

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Alexander Warren [mailto:u3292467 at student.anu.edu.au]
Sent: Thursday, 4 April 2002 9:44 AM
Cc: CLUG
Subject: Re: PostgreSQL vs MySQL?


I tried using MYSQL for my UNI database course last year, and found that
it was totally inadequate, so I used PostgresQL instead, and found that
it had equivilant functionality to Oracle which we use at UNI. 
Performance speed wasn't a problem, but then i only had one user for it
on a Pentium 166 MMX with 64M RAM.

My dad also said that PostgresQL was about equivilant to DB2 as well,
just as scalable and reliable. ( that means nothing to me, i've never
used DB2)


Cheers

Paul Warren.


Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> 
> Quick views on PostgreSQL vs MySQL (or even InterBase?)
> 
> I looking at teaching myself Java with the aim of building some cross
> platform database products.  My prefered platform is Linux, but I'd like to
> make things that work okay in the Windows world too (for strategic reasons
> only ;-).
> 
> MySQL has a reputation for being fast, but somewhat feature limited.  I note
> that its foreign key support is fairly recent and is still missing some
> features as far as I can tell.
> 
> PostgreSQL has a reputation for being slower (probably not a big issue for
> the type of apps I'm thinging of) but has a better feature set.
> 
> I didn't even know that there was an open source version of InterBase until I
> today.  It looks like a 'Mozilla' type of open source licence.
> Anyone got views on just how committed Borland is to open source?  (They have
> done Kylix as well...)
> 
> I guess my main issues are features (foreign key support would be good, and
> replication might be useful too) and portability.  In particular I was hoping
> for Windows 98 support (although I guess this will get less important over
> time as more people move to Linux - oh, and Windows XP etc rather than Win98
> I guess, but why anyone would do that is beyond me ;-).
> 
> I initially thought it was more portable than PostgreSQL, as I know it is
> Cygwin based and only claims to support NT etc.  However, I now notice that
> MySQL on Windows is also Cygwin based.  Anyone with any experience in how
> they compare running on Windows 98?  (Does PostgreSQL actually run on Windows
> 98?)
> 
> Based on my reading of the various websites, InterBase is looking like the
> best option, with PostgreSQL second and MySQL third.  But I'd like to hear
> from people that have actually used them (on any platform).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Rasjid.