PostgreSQL Slammed by PHP Creator

leifbk writes "'The Web is broken and it's all your fault' says Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP. He talks about not trusting user input, and the brokenness of IE, which is all fine. Then he makes a statement about MySQL vs PostgreSQL: 'If you can fit your problem into what MySQL can handle it's very fast,' Lerdorf said. 'You can gain quite a bit of performance.' For the items that MySQL doesn't handle as well as PostgreSQL, Lerdorf noted that some features can be emulated in PHP itself, and you still end up with a net performance boost. Naturally, the PostgreSQL community is rather unimpressed. One of the more amusing replies: 'I wasn't able to find anything the article worth discussing. If you give up A, C, I, and D, of course you get better performance- just like you can get better performance from a wheel-less Yugo if you slide it down a luge track.'"

Comments

Re:Rather incomplete quote

[LWATCDR]

I use both Postgres and MySQl. I use Postgres for in internal application that requires a lot of transactions and almost an equal amount of time updating as reading the data.
Websites tend to be write a little and read often in nature.
Where the author "which from your id I assume it is you" of this talk left himself open for bashing was his dismissal of the benefits of Postgres's additional features. It is probably possible to code around the features of Postgres but is that really the best solution for every website? I don't think I would want to code a web based accounting application with MySQL as a back end. Postgres or Oracel, or maybe DB2 might be a better solution for that problem than MySQL. If I need more performance I could always throw more hardware at the problem. From that very short news story the information from the talk seemed trivial and incomplete. Unlike most people on Slashdot I am willing to give you or whoever gave that talk the benefit of the doubt. It is a sad state of affairs but flames sell.
Any chance of downloading a transcript of the talk or a video/mp3 of it?

I think that for some applications MySQL is a good choice. For others Postgres is a better one. For other Maybe DB2 is needed. Some times you need a Civic, sometimes an SUV, and sometimes a semi-truck.
Now if we want to start in on the problems of PHP... :) Well let's just say I find adding modules a pain. the function names tend to be inconsistent, and configuration to be a pain in general. I use PHP because it is so dang useful but I can't say love using it.
However if you are the presenter of that talk I will say thanks for the tip on the cache. I will try that out. I am getting ready to deploy a new website using Drupal as the CMS and will load the cache up on our test server today. Also is there any reason not to boost the allowed size for uploads? Does it eat more ram for buffers or anything ugly like that?