MySQL vs. PostgreSQL?

[sans-hubris]

How do people rate the two against each other?

I personally use PostgreSQL (7.2) on my own machine, but I have to wonder why everyone uses MySQL. MySQL's great for small databases with simple queries, but that's about it. It's not scalable over certain sizes. It also doesn't support ANSI SQL all that well. A lot of advanced SQL features are not available to it.

PostgreSQL does, OTOH, do really well on very large databases and complex queries. It is fairly ANSI SQL compliant. It's also ACID compliant, unlike MySQL.

The only thing major that PostgreSQL lacks in is good ODBC support, but I think that that's going to be in the next release.

[EscapeCharacter]

i agree i dont see why it was more popular other than the fact that its easy to install/configure/whatever. postgres isnt much more difficult but also alot of distros come with mysql installed by default so that might also contribute to it being more popular but i think the major thing mysql has over postgres is it runs on windows(sure you can get install with cygwin but its a real pain) and believe it or not more people use windows than *nix'

[iDxMan]

At this point I'm not sure. Back in the <7.0 (?) days, I guess there was more talk where pG would [overall - I remember seeing some benchmarks from ~'99] take quite a performance hit. I've heard that recent versions are better and of course mysql has innodb support which raises its ACID level.

I stick with MySQL for the time being since I haven't had time to experiment with a recent version of PG. As for lacking features: yes, it would be nice for MY to catch up and provide views, stored procedures and such. (innodb supports foreign keys right?)

-r

[Strike]

Well, we focus on MySQL support for the bot because PostgreSQL was NOTICEABLY slower than MySQL even with just individual queries. I have a feeling that if we did some speed hacks like table indexing and whatnot, that it could have easily become a nonissue, but MySQL works really fast even under heavier load (no remarkably complex statements). There's surprisingly a large market for "small, fast SELECTs needed" databases.

[inkedmn]

i use mysql because it runs on windows and setting it up is a snap :)

once i get debian running here, i'll check out postgres for sure.

[roninblade]

IMHO, you cant compare one with the other. if you need a simple and fast database go for mySQL, but for more complex projects that need a full RDBMS go for postgreSQL.

inkedmn : i believe that setting up postgre on windows is not that hard anymore take a look at this:how to install PostgreSQL on windows (http://www3.uk.postgresql.org/docs/faq-mswin.html). but, i haven't had the time to fool around with it yet, so i cant really guarantee anything.