Re: Why is MySQL more chosen over PostgreSQL?

On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 16:00, Curt Sampson wrote:
> On 30 Jul 2002, Hannu Krosing wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 14:51, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
> >
> > > Bruce Momjian:
> > > > It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
> > >
> > > That's one reason.
> >
> > Seems like somewhat valid reason. But still not enough to do a lot of
> > work _and_ annoy a lot of existing users :)
> 
> It's almost unquestionably more work to maintain than to drop. Dropping
> support for it is a one-time operation. Maintaining it is an ongoing
> expense.

I would not rush to drop advanced features, as they may be hard to put
back later. If they stay in, even in broken form, then there wont be
nearly as much patches which make fixing them harder.

I'm afraid that we have already dropped too much. 

For example we dropped time travel, but recent versions of Oracle now
have some form of it, usable mostly for recovering accidentally deleted
(and committed rows), although it is much harder to implement it using
logs than using MVCC.

Also, I suspect that dropping support for multiple return sets for one
query was done too fast.

> > That's quite bogus imho. You could just as well argue that there is
> > nothing that relational model handles that can't be done in pure C.
> 
> That's a straw man argument.

Actually it was meant to be 'one straw man against another straw man 
argument' ;)

> What we (or I, anyway) are arguing is that
> the relational model does everything that table inheritance does, and at
> least as easily.

The problem is that 'the relational model' does nothing by itself. It is
always the developers/DBAs who have to do things. 

And at least for some brain shapes it is much more convenient to inherit
tables than to (re)factor stuff into several tables to simulate
inheritance using the relational model. 

I still think that inheritance should be enchanced and made compatible
with standards not removed.

> Extending the model adds complexity without adding the
> ability to do things you couldn't easily do before. (This, IMHO, makes
> table inheritance quite inelegant.)

Then explain why SQL99 has included inheritance ?

---------------
Hannu