On 10-07-29 02:57 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Samantha Atkins<sjatkins@mac.com> writes:
>
>> Why is MySQL so much more popular right now, especially in the
>> OpenSource community?
>>
> I think it's strictly historical. The mysql bias you see in so
> many web tools was established in the late 90s, a time when mysql
> worked reasonably well (at least according to the mysql developers'
> notion of "reasonably well") whereas postgres was still pretty slow
> and buggy. It took us a long time to get from the original
> academically-oriented code to something of real production quality.
> We're definitely competitive now, but I don't know if we'll ever fully
> overcome that historical disadvantage.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
>
Postgres also had a reputation of being slow compared to MySQL.
This was due to a lot of really poor MySQL vs Postgres benchmarks
floating around in the early 2000's. They generally tested stock
configurations (MySQL had a less restrictive out of the box
configuration) and they tended to test things like how fast can a single
client insert/update/delete data from a table. Unsurprisingly, MySQL
won, as Postgres imposed all sorts of pesky behind the scenes protection
for your data that MySQL didn't worry about.
No one really tested it in a way that mattered, which was how the two
databases performed under concurrent load, where Postgres won hands down.
--
Brad Nicholson 416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.