Postgres in Utah

[Barry Roberts]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 9:45 PM, Sasha Pachev <sasha at asksasha.com> wrote:

> >* This is not meant to incite a flame war, but I would be curious to
> > hear what Mr Pachev has to say about this.
>
> Thus Posgres is more academically correct, while
> MySQL will deviated from academic correctness to achieve better
> performance and improve user experience. I suppose for a small
> business academic correctness is not as important as actually getting
> the job done.
>
> I suppose that's one way to look at it.  But it's not the only one.  I've
used PosgreSQL for several internal projects at a business, but not because
it was academically correct.

Postgres has for years been much closer to feature parity with Oracle (and
maybe other commercial databases).  I've used MySQL a lot for web, and
especially read-heavy applications.  But when I already have code that
relies on Oracle features like transactions, triggers, and pl/sql, pg works
where MySQL wouldn't.

MySQL has added some of those features, but not all of them last time I
checked.  And I do still have to put a little work into porting pl/sql.  But
my point is that I've never chosen postgres over mysql for academic reasons.
 I chose it because it provided solutions that MySQL can't.

My biggest postgres database is just over 1 TB, and it does have performance
problems because all our DBA's are Oracle guys and won't touch postgres to
optimize it.  I doesn't help that it's running on 32-bit hardware, either.