On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Tim Chase <python.l...@tim.thechases.com> wrote: > Reading the MySQL gotchas and comparing it to the PostgreSQL gotchas, the > MySQL ones scare the pants off my inner DBA, while the PostgreSQL ones are > mostly "if you're running at 6+yr old version of the software, there are > some peculiar behaviors". >
Some of them are still current, though they're the least serious. The requirement for "AS" in column aliasing is, imho, not a serious problem - according to the SQL spec, an omitted comma is interpreted as an alias, but PG will throw an error. The point that "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM table" is slow is simply that MySQL happens to know the current size of the table and can return it instantly... as soon as you put a WHERE clause on it, both databases will perform more comparably. Also, I think that advantage applies only to MyISAM tables, the default but also the most problematic. PostgreSQL does have a number of gotchas, mostly relating to performance (for instance, the default configuration on install is designed to work on as many systems as possible, which means it'll perform suboptimally everywhere, and especially will not take advantage of heaps of RAM). But MySQL has a *lot* more (whose insane idea was it to treat "database" and "schema" as synonymous??). ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
