On Aug 11, 2004, at 9:04 PM, Sam Tregar wrote:
MySQL is, in my opinion, the best free database. It's definitely better than PostgreSQL and I should know, I spent more than a year and a half working with it on the Bricolage project. Of course, how one defines "better" is subjective. Here are a few observations that come to mind:
- MySQL is more stable. The developers of MySQL do an absolutely amazing job vetting new releases before they're declared stable. I encountered exactly one bug in MySQL while developing Krang. Just one! I don't have enough fingers to count all the bugs I saw in PostgreSQL while working on Bricolage.
To whom did you report them? I don't recall you running into any bugs, only features you were used to in MySQL but were missing in PostgreSQL.
- MySQL is faster and easier to optimize when it's running slow.
Indexes just work 99% of the time, unlike PostgreSQL's lame VACUUM
ANALYZE run-around.
Huh? This is because MySQL doesn't keep statistics, which long term is to its detriment. PostgreSQL 7.4 introduced pg_autovaucuum, and it is built-in to the server in 8.0, so now it's a no-brainer.
- MySQL is easier to master and harder to abuse. The set of
supported commands is much smaller than most databases. That
means it's harder to end up with a rat's nest of a database
schema. Harder, but of course not impossible!
You also don't get any of the advantages of more advanced databases.
Now, to be fair, PostgreSQL has a lot of features that aren't present in MySQL. I tend to think most of them aren't all they're cracked up to be, but I understand that a reasonable person can disagree.
Yep. But this is old hat for you and me, isn't it? ;-)
Sure, that too. My constant refrain while I led the Krang's development was "YAGNI" - You Ain't Gonna Need It. We definitely didn't need to support more than one DB, so we didn't. If someone wants to come along and add PostgreSQL support, I think that's fine. I think it's about as likely as someone porting Bricolage to MySQL, but people talk about that all the time too!
Hrm, so Krang has embedded SQL like Bricolage? Pity. I would certainly never do that again.
Regards,
David
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