Slashdot Mirror
Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB
Nerval's Lobster writes For the past ten years, developers and tech pros have made a game of comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL, with the latter seen by many as technically superior. Those who support PostgreSQL argue that its standards support and ACID compliance outweighs MySQL's speed. But MySQL remains popular thanks to its inclusion in every Linux Web hosting package, meaning that a mind-boggling number of Web developers have used it. In a new article, developer David Bolton compares MySQL/MariaDB 5.7.6 (released March 9, 2015) with PostgreSQL 9.4.1 and thinks the latter remains superior on several fronts, including subqueries, JSON support, and better licensing and data integrity: "I think MySQL has done a great job of improving itself to keep relevant, but I have to confess to favoring PostgreSQL."
Let me quote, from the comments thread at a recent article by same submitter:
Another user, in the same thread, had speculated:
No, sir, you were utterly wrong. It came "Postgresql is better than Mysql".
I come from a Sybase SQL Anywhere shop. It never ceases to amaze me how stuff that can be elegantly expressed in a couple of queries in Watcom-SQL typically takes four times as much code in MySQL's dialect. I love Sybase's support for the ANSI standards, subqueries, Java/.NET/C/PHP/Perl stored procedures when they are the right tool for the job (ever needed to resize raster images in an INSERT trigger coming from some third-party application?), and great drivers. I shouldn't have to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why MySQL doesn't support the standard casting string concatenation operator by default (||), or why subqueries don't work like they ought, etc.
Having used Postgres, all of the worthwhile MySQL features are there, most of the SQLA features are there, and the pain level is much, much lower in Postgres than MySQL for someone coming from a full-featured commercial RDBMS.
What really sucks is all of the applications that are so coded around MySQLisms that they don't run on ANSI-compliant engines.
MS SQL server has its place:
1: Oftentimes a company already has it licensed, so might as well use it.
2: It is auditor friendly, with the pieces of paper (FIPS, etc.) that don't mean much in real life, but do mean a lot when ISO, or other audits happen, and you have to justify your existence and design decisions. (For those who say certificates/certifications don't matter, one place I worked actually had auditors that would fire people on the spot for "failing to have authority to run the equipment" if their RHCE/MCSE/CCIE certs lapsed.)
3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.
4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.
This isn't to say that PostgreSQL is bad... but there are times where MS SQL is the ideal choice.
SQLite3 is a fantastic product, but it's primarily intended as an embedded SQL database, not an RDBMS. They're not really intended to do the same things.
On the other hand, at least SQLite doesn't "feature" silent non-deterministic aggregates.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
And I'm probably going to step on a lot of toes here, but people like me strongly prefer Postgres to MySQL. And by "people like me" I mean folks for whom their first real rdbms experience was theoretical or "commercial". I did both.
I used ingres in college to a small extent and then the Ingres commercial product for years after that. I have also used Sybase and Oracle professionally. PostgreSQL easily walks among the giants of that industry.
Every time this discussion comes up the MySQL side has to say "yeah, but..." about a thousand times. MySQL doesn't do ______ properly? "Yeah, but if you just install this other piece of software and change a couple of config files it *can* do it.' Well, con-fucking-gratulations!
The point is that PostgreSQL does exactly what it should do out of the box. I don't have to change a configuration file to make it ACID compliant, fast, correct, whatever. It just works and works correctly out of the box.
Every time someone tells me how easy MySQL is to set up they've betrayed their experience level in this realm.
I know a lot of you are going to mod me down - I don't care. But why not reply instead?
Do you have ESP?
Was the last version of SQL Server you used 7.0 or something. I love to dump on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but honestly SQL Sever 2000 on is pretty damn good. As far as falling over when hit with significant load, I was running a 60TB database on the first Itanium versions of SQL 2000 back in '04 and it never 'fell over'.
The project was big enough and cost enough Microsoft was willing to send people out to help us tweak and tune. That is all we did though nothing exotic like a custom build or anything. Just end user tuneables and guidance on schema around partition views and like.
So really there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the Microsoft platform family but SQL Server falling over ain't one of them.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So? There's a free version of Oracle too, if you are willing to expose yourself like that.
"Getting something for nothing" usually isn't the point of using "serious commercial enterprise software".
Non-free Oracle can even be licensed in ways that make it as cheap as a more expensive consumer application.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I've had the misfortunate to work with 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2, and 2012, and every single one of them has failed spectacularly, many of them with the same basic issue, that wonderful escalating locks problem, which MS spins as a "performance improvement" much like driving a bus off a cliff improves its performance, and in much the same way.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.