Re: installing Oracle on Debian AMD64
Lennart Sorensen wrote on 31/10/2005 15:41:
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 09:51:31PM +0200, Jean-Christophe Montigny wrote:
>
>>Well, I am afraid I'm not quite postgresql-literate, and I live by the
>>(perhaps false) assumption that PostgreSQL and MySQL are more or less
>>the same : open source database projects, except PostgreSQL are supposed
>>to be "faster" in reading and "slower" in writing than MySQL, and that
>>they roughly have the same capabilities..
>
>
> Postgres has much more complete SQL syntax support,
That might have been the case before MySQL 5.0, but as far as I can
tell, now MySQL has the more complete and more standard-compliant
support for SQL 2003.
> and finer grain locking than mysql.
It locks finer than a single column?
> They are quite different in features and their target markets.
That's for certain. I wouldn't try using Postgres with database
replication (i.e. automatically keeping two or more databases in sync
with automatic updates when the master is updated etc.) currently. MySQL
has done this quite fine for some years though.
Full-text indexes and real-time replication support (or lack of mature
solutions for this) really are downsides of Postgres.
> It is also easier to be fast writing if you lock the
> whole table and prevent others from accessing it while you update
> things. Slows down reading to stopped while you do a write though.
True. But MySQL gives you the choice: MyISAM tables are fast in writing
and might get slow if you concurrently try to read. InnoDB on the other
hand is slower, but uses column-locking instead of table-locking. It's
not really faster on reads than MyISAM if you do reads only, but it is
faster on reads if you concurrently write to your tables.
> Postgres does have quite a lot of support for triggers and events to
> perform, although I have no idea how it compares to Oracle. It is a lot
> better than mysql though.
Is it? What kind of trigger does Postgres support that MySQL (5)
doesn't? I didn't find any when I browsed through the trigger
documentation for each. I might have overlooked some trigger which isn't
currently supported by MySQL, but is by Postgres.
I really don't like this repeated Postgres is better than MySQL bashing
that is mostly based on long-outdated versions of MySQL. Both Postgres
and MySQL are good database systems. However, each seems to have its own
pro´s and con´s, and it all depends on what _you_ want to do with your
database. For me, real-time replication is far more important than some
obscure ACID things (Adam Skutt said MySQL had tons of things which can
cause transaction invalidation, but honestly: transactions are there
specifically to catch these invalidations instead of running headlong
into an inconsistant database, and I actually never experienced a single
transaction failure with MySQL). And even though Adam said MySQL would
lack working row-locking, this has never failed for me. Subqueries have
been supported since MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 also gives stored procedures and
proper trigger support.
So all in all: Check _your_ needs regarding database functionality (both
on SQL level and on the database management level). After that, you can
decide which DB-software is the best for _you_ (i.e. fullfills your
requirements and is relatively cheap). There simply is no best database
software (though there might be the worst somewhere).
cu,
sven
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