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PostgreSQL Slammed by PHP Creator

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the yay-luge dept.

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.'"

6 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. News Flash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    PHP user doesn't like some database!

  2. Re:"a universal fix all" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Sometimes PHP is good, other times it sucks
    Here, let me fix that for you ;-)
    Sometimes PHP sucks, other times it sucks
  3. That's funny... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    ... I always thought that the weekly security holes in PHP, along with the accompanying defacement of every community site on the net, was one of the things that made the net "broken".

  4. Re:Avoid databases... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    bukakke bukakke bukakke bukakke bukakke bukakke

    I LIKE BUKAKKE!!!!

  5. PHP is the problem, not the cure? by Idaho · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yes, maybe this explains why many people think that PHP sucks?

    That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe ;)

    --
    Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
  6. Re:Avoid databases... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    There are many ways to rank the functionality of things, not one correct way.

    Not really there isn't. It's either the best at what it does or it isn't and when you make "what it does" the category of software it is (e.g. "it does relational database management") it really doesn't make a difference if it's very good at niche jobs. What's confusing you regarding the point I'M making is that I fully recognize the difference between whether or not something is "the best" and whether or not it's "the most viable option given the situation".

    The former is a purely theoretical concept and the latter is more business-oriented.

    "Superior as an RDBMS" is mostly a meaningless, or at least equivocal and ambiguous, category.

    Well, I wouldn't call it meaningless. I would call it impractical, yes, but not entirely meaningless. It has certainly made for an interesting discussion thus far if nothing else.

    Sure, in the sense that "different" is not "equal".

    Now you're catching on to what I'm getting at.

    Its like saying "A hammer is an inferior tool. It's good at driving nails, and that's it."

    But that's absolutely true. It is inferior as "a tool". If you only have "a tool" and nothing else, and you choose a hammer, you're screwed. If you choose a very simple thing that can be used to make OTHER tools you're in business no matter how little you have on hand. Naturally, in today's business climate it's fairly rare, outside software engineering and research, to find a scenario where you need to build any of your own tools. Hence, impractical.

    Really? If the other one can consistently hit a receiver out to 80 yards, but almost always fumbles the snap, I'm not sure if I could agree that the one you describe is "still an inferior quarterback": you can't label something inferior to something else when you describe the features of only one of the two things being compared.

    Well, that really only expands my illustration. The point is that one is almost certainly better at doing their overall job than the other.

    would say that ranking tools without reference to application is generally meaningless except in the narrow case where the ranking holds without exception for all conceivable, or at least realistic, tasks.

    And I would say you're right, but I'd again say it's impractical, not meaningless.

    Of course, we kind of lost my original point in all of this: one really is better than the other and all other things being equal in a given scenario, it does become meaningful to apply that fact.