On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Benjamin Scott wrote: > On Sun, 17 Feb 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > MySQL is great for small queries and small databases. > > While I'm no expert in this stuff (indeed, I rarely touch it), my > understanding is that MySQL is great for databases which are mostly > read-only, as opposed to just small. MySQL is optimized for speed over > completeness. For example, Slashdot likes MySQL, because most of the > database load is reading data for page generation. Comments are posted > relatively rarely (compared to page-views).
Correct, if memory serves me when MySQL does a write it does a whole table lock (or was that a whole DB lock, can't remember). Anyway, it's very quick at reads, at the expense of writes. There are other limitations of MySQL, for instance no sub-select (select * from table where field in (select * from....)). To get round this you can sometimes use a join, at other times it requires a temporary table. It also doesn't support commit/rollback - basically if one part of this update fails, roll back any other changes to the previous state. Note that these limitations are being addressed and 4.xx (in alpha ?) supports sub-selects and there is transaction support as well. However the mysql shipped with any distro probably won't have that. Postgresql has all these features, isn't probably used by as many sites and definetly hasn't received the same amount of attention (yet) but is still a nice solid product that many people will swear by. I also find it to be a little more secure out of the box and a little harder to get started with, but putting in the effort is worth it. If you're doing any serious sort of web application my suggestion would be to make it as DB neutral as possible. It makes it a little more painful at first as you can't necessarily make use of feature X of database Y but later on this usually pays off. However as usual YMMV. --rdp -- Rich Payne http://talisman.mv.com ***************************************************************** To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the text 'unsubscribe gnhlug' in the message body. *****************************************************************
