Re: installing Oracle on Debian AMD64
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 :
That's a totally false assumption. You'd be better off thinking of
PostgreSQL as "Oracle-lite" as that's what it's a very close
approximation to, and it's probably a better tool if you don't need
Oracle's raw performance or some of it's specific features.
open source database projects, except PostgreSQL are supposed
to be "faster" in reading and "slower" in writing than MySQL,
You have that backwards, especially if we're talking about MyISAM.
and that
they roughly have the same capabilities..
Nope. Ignoring the just released MySQL 5, PgSQL had all sorts of
features MySQL hasn't ever had including:
* Proper ACID transactions (even with InnoDB, MySQL has tons of things
that cause transaction invalidation, including locks. PgSQL only has
a few minor things).
* Stored Procedures (well, really UDFs) in several languages, including
PLPGSQL, Perl, Ruby, TCL, and a few others.
* Proper Subquery support (Fixed in MySQL 4.1).
* Functional row-locking model.
There are others, but those are the traditional core differences. Now,
MySQL has rectified some of that with 5.0, but hte verdict is still out
on it as a production Database server.
as I said it only becomes good when you have a single DB
that is being used by several clients and you need data consistency
without having to modify all the clients when there's a structural
change (for instance, say you add a table that needs updated when you do
whatever action on the other tables -- Oracle allows you to code an
event associated to that action - ie a procedure...).
As does PostgreSQL.
Adam
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