i would like to add something because that article about MySQL😛ostgreSQL is kinda confusing to me.
but thanks for the article, it gave me some good info 😉
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3?page=1
on some occasions he says that MySQL is 3 times faster but PostgreSQL can take 3 times more load and is 3 times slower? if i divide those "3", it looks all the same to me... i mean: if we reach maximum performance with MySQL at one point and serving 10 users per second, then i would assume that PostgreSQL can survive 30 users in 3 seconds. whats the difference now? if 30 users will come to the site [per second - thats 90 in 3 seconds], both will die. am i wrong?
the other thing is that he never ran into database or index corruption with MySQL. i have been maintaining 50 databases on 10 different servers [mostly search engines, which have heavy load!] and i ran into index corruption at least 10 times. i dont know what the reason was but i would expect from the database not to do that or if indexes get corrupted, database could fix it itself instead of doing nothing and just throwing out errors.
i dont know how other DB handle that but what i find really annoying with MySQL is:
- index creation
- delete large number of records
i always have to do that over a HUGE table [seems to be too huge for it] - 1.5 mio records, 1+GB size. when i drop an index and create a new one it takes ages! same for simple
DELETE FROM log WHERE (date9 < 'something')
although i stop apache and dont allow new users to surf the web and interfere with it, it took it 343 seconds to delete 30% of records from 1.5 mio records table. and i had an index by date9 field. 2000 Mhz machine, 512 RAM. isnt this loooooong? it seems like forever.
yes, i know that the system can be slow if both apache and the DB are on the same machine but in this case apache was stopped. i would expect [or better: i would love to see] that such DELETE operation would be finished in ahm... 5 seconds?
the point: i dont know is PostgreSQL is "better" but i have to try, i have no other choice. MySQL was fine, fast and reliable most of the time. i can always recommend it for simple websites. but once you have a site with lots of inserts/selects/updates going on in one second, i would not recommend it. but i still have find if there is something more reliable. maybe there isnt and i will have to stick with it.
