> Is it true that the current version of PostgreSQL does always respect
> atomicity of transactions and MySQL does not?
MySQL only supports transactions on INNODB tables. Therefore if your
transactions includes other tables, we doubt atomicity works. Note this might
change with MySQL 4.1.
PostgreSQL offers the ability to build "intelligent" database with
server-side programming (PLperl, PLpgSQL, ..), triggers, rules, views,
operators... It is a real development tool.
In a complex environment, PostgreSQL can be optimized at ***software level***
(i.e. the way you build the database and program is server-side). MySQL can
only be optimized at ***OS level*** or ***Harware level***.
OS and Hardware level optimization can speed up an application by a factor of
2. Software optimization has no limit other than your imagination.
On the converse, MySQL is just an "dumb" database only running simple SQL
queries. Furthermore, it has very poor ODBC support and will only work in an
Apache environment.
If you are new to PostgreSQL, maybe the best thing to do is play with it
using pgAdmin2 GUI, which can be found at http://pgadmin.postgresql.org.
Best regards,
/Jean-Michel POURE