3 ms·

Why Postgres? I'm a fan of it, but I wonder why they can't/won't use mysql? (I'm looking for a good technical explanation, if anyone has one.)

moe 16y ago
My guess would be that NASA already uses postgres for other duties and is hesitant to introduce a new database into their infrastructure - especially one with so many known problems. If I was them then I most certainly wouldn't want a database with silent data truncation/corruption issues to come anywhere near my spaceships. Not even for seemingly unimportant tasks because even those may cost amazing amounts of money to fix if they go wrong a few thousand kilometers above groundlevel...
- ugh 16y ago
  Regrettably only a few hundred kilometers above groundlevel (the ISS is at a height of about 350 km).
rbranson 16y ago
PostgreSQL is well-known for it's focus on data integrity and durability first, performance second. The team didn't really focus heavily on performance until the 8.x release series, after the database had been proven as extremely stable. Also, it has a much more complete implementation of SQL and larger feature set.
dboyd 16y ago
I've used both very recently, and I would definitely avoid MySQL given a choice. From my experience, postgres is faster, especially at more difficult problems (complex joins). I've never had issues in postgres joining several tables into 10 million plus row relations, and then filtering down to the set of interest. I did a recent test adding a similar column to a MySQL table with 3 million rows in it compared to adding a column to a postgres table with 30 million rows in it. MySQL took 3000 seconds, and postgres took 82 ms. Functional indexes. Doing things like "create unique index user_emails on users (lower(email));" works great in postgres. A quick google reveals this: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Why_PostgreSQL_Instead_of_MySQL_2009 http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Why_PostgreSQL_Instead_of_My... It's a bit old, but it might provide more insight.

moe 16y ago

My guess would be that NASA already uses postgres for other duties and is hesitant to introduce a new database into their infrastructure - especially one with so many known problems. If I was them then I most certainly wouldn't want a database with silent data truncation/corruption issues to come anywhere near my spaceships. Not even for seemingly unimportant tasks because even those may cost amazing amounts of money to fix if they go wrong a few thousand kilometers above groundlevel...

ugh 16y ago
Regrettably only a few hundred kilometers above groundlevel (the ISS is at a height of about 350 km).

rbranson 16y ago

PostgreSQL is well-known for it's focus on data integrity and durability first, performance second. The team didn't really focus heavily on performance until the 8.x release series, after the database had been proven as extremely stable. Also, it has a much more complete implementation of SQL and larger feature set.

dboyd 16y ago

I've used both very recently, and I would definitely avoid MySQL given a choice. From my experience, postgres is faster, especially at more difficult problems (complex joins). I've never had issues in postgres joining several tables into 10 million plus row relations, and then filtering down to the set of interest. I did a recent test adding a similar column to a MySQL table with 3 million rows in it compared to adding a column to a postgres table with 30 million rows in it. MySQL took 3000 seconds, and postgres took 82 ms. Functional indexes. Doing things like "create unique index user_emails on users (lower(email));" works great in postgres. A quick google reveals this: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Why_PostgreSQL_Instead_of_MySQL_2009 http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Why_PostgreSQL_Instead_of_My... It's a bit old, but it might provide more insight.