PostgreSQL vs MySQL?

[Matthew Hawkins]

On Thu, 04 Apr 2002, Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> Quick views on PostgreSQL vs MySQL (or even InterBase?)

MySQL is extremely fast, reliable, and seems to be supported by more
applications.  The biggest downside is not having sub-selects - iirc
they're going to look at that this development cycle.  Despite what
somebody else said, it does have transaction support - you need to use
Berkeley DB or InnoDB table types when you create the table you want
transaction support on.  With the standard tables, for most things you
don't need transactions anyway as operations are atomic (unlike
postgresql which will happily corrupt all your data)

I haven't used postgresql since 6.3, where launching Office 2000 in
Win2k in vmware running over an encrypted tunnel through a string & 2
tin cans felt a lot faster than it.  That particular problem was
supposed to have been fixed in 7.0 though as I said, I haven't tried.
Apart from it being trivially easy to corrupt all your data and losing
badly against molasses in the speed race, oh, and falling over every 15
minutes or so, the API was quite rich (and, at the time, much more
impressive than MySQL's)

Unless you're going to be DBA, why do you particularly care which one is
used?  Pick one for testing your own development, but if your
application is any good you'll let JDBC abstract the backend DB - and
let the end user decide which flavor headache to get.

-- 
Matt