Re: Why is Postgres so much better than MySQL?

["Fred @ Planetary Server" <user=1474@nabble.blu.org>]

On Sun, 2008-01-13 at 23:14 -0500, Jarod Wilson wrote: 
> On Sunday 13 January 2008 10:33:25 pm [hidden email] wrote: 
> > > I would say that the MySQL results on tweakers.net is the results of a 
> > > poorly tuned MySQL. Without seeing the settings for both, the results 
> > > are less than useless -- they can be downright misleading. 
> > 
> > Well, I can say from my own experience that MySQL falls apart under high 
> > concurrency compared to PostgreSQL. 

I did a little digging, and found this on the MySQL bugs database: 

http://urlbit.us/87o
http://urlbit.us/87t

There *were* semaphore and concurrency issues with MySQL, but it's been 
fixed. Both of these bugs are now closed. It's fixed in the latest 5.0 
and 5.1 releases, and have been fixed for quite some time now. 

It would appear that the benchmarks markw posted were on releases that 
still had the bug, so those benchmarks are out of date. 

> First up, let me say that I don't really give a rip one way or the other which 
> one is "better", and I'm not a DB person. I generally only touch a database 
> when some program I'm working with needs a database, and I use whatever the 
> project suggests. More often than not, its been MySQL (mythtv, maia mailguard 
> and zabbix are the main projects that come to mind). 

Well, MythTV certainly won't be putting a heavy load on MySQL, unless 
you do a helluvalot of media surfing!!! :-) 

> However... An interesting tidbit I can throw out there in the "which one 
> handles huge loads better" debate: 
> 
> Red Hat recently ditched Postgres for bugzilla.redhat.com, because it simply 
> couldn't hold up to the load put on it. bugzilla.redhat.com now runs against 
> a MySQL 5.1 database cluster. How much of the move was due to MySQL having 
> better clustering/replication/etc vs. performance of a single instance, I 
> have no idea, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. 

For the right applications, clustering will definitely give you one hell 
of a performance boost. In 5.1, you can now replicate from one cluster 
to another, or from a cluster to a single instance, offering many 
possibilities I salivate at. Also, 5.1 has row-level replication as an 
option, solving a number of pitfalls with statement-based replication. I 
have no idea how Postgres fares in this arena. 

So, my money is still with MySQL. I have used MySQL AB in the past, and 
the support is good there as well. I have no idea if Postgres has an 
equivalent. 

-Fred 



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