Postgres Engine for MySQL Released

SlashRating^© 11.9 slashdottit! ^tm krow writes "One of the unique qualities of the MySQL server is its ability to have multiple storage engine operate concurrently. Companies like Oracle and Solid have contributed their own storage engines to the open source project. With 5.1 MySQL has added the ability to now do this in a loadable fashion, allowing dynamic engines in the same manner as Apache with its modules. Now PostgreSQL can add its self to the list of databases who have contributed a storage engine to MySQL. I'm releasing today a plugin so that you can now plugin the Postgres database engine into MySQL and have it work natively along side other engines."

Comments

BUT...

[dark_15]

Will it blend?

should speed up Postgresql

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the problems with Postgresql versus MySQL is that it is typically much, much slower and less capable. THis should address those problems.

Re:should speed up Postgresql

[metamatic]

Actually, it's a useful idea. MySQL is only faster than PostgreSQL for "toy" databases (low concurrency, few transactions needed per second), or if you throw away ACID capabilities.

However, a lot of open source projects use non-portable MySQL "SQL", and hence don't work if you try to use PostgreSQL as your back end. A hack like this that actually worked would let you run crappy open source code on a more scalable database back end.

Re:should speed up Postgresql

[Master of Transhuman]

PostgreSQL is LESS capable than MySQL? (Slower at some things, maybe, but LESS CAPABLE?)

Leave the crack pipe at home next time.

Re:should speed up Postgresql

[jadavis]

A hack like this that actually worked would let you run crappy open source code on a more scalable database back end.

A lot of PostgreSQL's performance comes from it's cost-based optimizer that chooses the correct plan based on statistically sampling your real data periodically. In other words, as your data changes, your plans change accordingly without administrator intervention. MySQL's optimizer is much more primitive.

Also, PostgreSQL has much more sophisticated options when planning, like bitmap index scans (which can be ANDed/ORed with other indexes and reorder the tuple fetching in disk order), GIN and GiST indexes, Hash Aggregates, Hash Joins, etc.

However, if PostgreSQL were just a "storage engine" I don't MySQL's storage API would pass enough information about the high-level query down to the PostgreSQL storage engine. That means PostgreSQL couldn't make good choices for plans.

A "storage engine" with a simple API for storing/fetching records is fairly uninteresting from a database performance standpoint.

Granted, PostgreSQL's MVCC is likely to be a win under concurrent access in some situations. But the wide range of performance that PostgreSQL delivers without modification of application queries (or administrator intervention) is where it really shines.

13 Meg GZ file no less

[fruey]

If you're going to get Slashdotted, posting a link to a 13MB file is a bit risky, no?

Anyone manage to dl it? I gave up a few minutes ago.

Re:I'm Lost

[beckerist]

There are 4 links to corporations home pages. There's 1 link to someone's blog that contains a broken link to a non-existent plug-in. Not only that, I think this would make a much bigger stink if it were real. So, my thoughts: APRIL FOOLS!

Eh

[Spazntwich]

5.1 is old. Wake me up when they've got a true 7.1 setup available.

Can't hold my breath...

[Epaminondas Pantulis]

till they release a DBase III engine...

Re:I'm Lost

[kirun]

A clue for you:

mysql> select * from april;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

SQL Server Engine?

[Zebra1024]

This would have been a better joke if it was Microsoft adding a SQL Server engine.

Re:Seriously though...can someone explain it

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just rival DBMSes, that's all. It's not actually particularly funny.

MySQL teh suck?

[Urusai]

I thought with MySQL going all corporate and proprietary-like, the bandwagon was jumping ship. MySQL always sucked anyway, unless you were operating a flat file type database. In conclusion, quit swinging on MySQL's nuts. Thank you.

Re:MySQL teh suck?

[isorox]

The only ways mysql gets into corporate machine are
1) Grass roots simply installing it
2) Snr Mgmt being dazzled by golf and wine weekends

I can get my techliterate boss to point to a costly Mysql enterprise support package in those high up meetings where nothing really gets decided, but decisions float down from, and we are fine to dump Oracle for the latest 2000 queries/day intranet site.

In reality the support will be mostly Usenet, but it keeps the suits happy knowing that it must be good because it has a corporation selling it.

I can then arrange a junket to a mysql training course in some exotic country to teach something that could easily be learnt from online docs, but is ammo to go into bat with with suppliers that sold us a painful system to work with (load data from master on a database with 500MB of indexes and several updates per second is not a great way to ensure uptime, but they won't even entertain the idea of a mysql cluster at the moment. This "system" caused me 2 hours of grief this morning (fortunatly experience suggested that we'd need extended downtime).

Re:The Lamest April Fools Story Yet

[VJ42]

It's like "OMG Postgres!!!!" Perfect tag! :P

laugh if you like...

[doom]

Laugh if you like, but you can actually do this trick the other way around, if you like:

There's a project called "dbilink" that uses the fact that you can run perl inside of postgresql to use DBI to talk to other databases. You can use tables from a mysql database inside of a postgres database...

Re:laugh if you like...

[dfetter]

Pardon the self-promotion, but you can find DBI-Link at http://pgfoundry.org/projects/dbi-link/ and on EPEL for RHEL/CentOS. Oh, and it's not restricted to MySQL. You can use any DBD with a certain minimal feature set, and I'm trying to reduce that minimum.

Help Needed: Error 2013

[ballmerfud]

I compiled and installed the plugin and every time I try it, get the following:

mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN postgres SONAME 'libpostgres_engine.so';
... where am I? Oh God no. No. NO!
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)
kill(getpid(), 9)

ERROR 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query

Re:Seriously though...can someone explain it

[Just Some Guy]

can someone give a quick summary as to why this is hilarious and people are currently LOL

Have you ever laughed at a hopped-up Dodge Neon with a whale tail and three rows of headlights? Well, imagine that the owner had found managed to buy a Ferrari, rip its engine out, and install it in the Dodge. It would be an interesting hack, but why not just drive the Ferrari in the first place?

Re:Seriously though...can someone explain it

[Iron Condor]

It's kinda like someone making an add-on to firefox to allow it to use IE as a render engine in a given tab.

Oh, wait...

dept.?

[The Madd Rapper]

Is it notable that this story doesn't have a "from the ... dept." line? How common is that?

Re:When to use then vs. Than

[Master of Transhuman]

"of all nations America is the one that has traditionally been a haven for immigrants from all cultures"

The operative word here is "traditionally".

Once the immigrants got here, they immediately began discriminating against NEWER immigrants. Look at the histories of the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Middle Easterners, the you-name-it.

That hasn't stopped.

It's human nature - if you're not one of "us" - for no matter how small a set of "us" (down to order 1 for me) - you're bad.

Chimpanzees have better manners.