PostgreSQL vs MySQL?

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

What do you mean by "fast"?

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3

Postgres is probably (slightly) overkill for small DBs, MySQL
is probably faster because it's designed with small DBs in mind.
The picture could be totally different if you are talking about
larger DBs.

Matthew Hawkins wrote:
On MySQL:
> MySQL is extremely fast, reliable, and seems to be supported by more
> applications.  The biggest downside is not having sub-selects - iirc

On Postgres:
> 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.

For 90% of what people use DBs for, it probably doesn't matter.
If you are in the 10% though, it matters very much. It would probably
be fair to say if you don't know why you should use RDBMS "A" instead
of RDBMS "B", it probably doesn't matter. Rasmus Lerdorf had entertaining
views when it came to DB abstraction, feeling it was a lowest common
denominator approach and that we may as well use MS SQLServer. :o) 

Antti