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While Postgres seems nice, mySQL is still the choice of the majority of high-traffic sites that absolutely need to scale. I'm not saying Postgres is bad, but t
by mdasen 19y ago
While Postgres seems nice, mySQL is still the choice of the majority of high-traffic sites that absolutely need to scale. I'm not saying Postgres is bad, but their only huge-volume user is Skype. They simply don't have as many of the huge, high-traffic users such as craigslist, eBay, Ticketmaster, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
Those sites need to scale an order of magnitude (or several) greater than sites like CD Baby or Macworld.
Just look at: http://www.postgresql.org/about/users http://www.postgresql.org/about/users
Other than Skype, there aren't as high-use sites as the ones I mentioned that go for mySQL. Postgres isn't bad, but it just hasn't been tested at the same level. Could it do better at that level? It IS possible. I prefer to go for a sure thing.
- nostrademons 19y agoReddit is also Postgres, if you consider that high-volume.
- apathy 19y agoDid not know this -- very cool. One of the only reasons I still use MySQL is that PostgreSQL would break some Drupal sites I deployed. I miss the ease of obtaining relational integrity under Postgres (although pgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's). Have scaled up to saturating an OC12 with Postgres (17 web servers) and doing 30 million hits/month with MySQL, so it's not like I care that much, but MySQL has a nasty tendency to piss me off in corner cases, and I'm getting tired of it. Definite pros and cons to both. I've seen people stick with (and patch) a particular point release ofMySQL (eg. 3.23 for AdWords at one point) just because the errors were consistent and they were no longer doing much to the schema. Never seen that happen with PostgreSQL. Jeremy Zawodny's tools (mytop, etc.) are invaluable if you have to get a MySQL shop to scale up (eg. without migrating a metric fuckload of existing SQL), btw.
- neilc 19y agopgsql's EXPLAIN can be horrifying compared to MySQL's Really? I'm curious if you could explain what you found unintuitive about PG's EXPLAIN. BTW, there's a "ptop" (pg_top) project for PostgreSQL as well.
- apathy 19y agopsql's EXPLAIN basically shows you the execution plan, IIRC. MySQL's EXPLAIN provides the information about what keys will be hit for which joins in a more compact fashion.
- babul 19y agoThat was probably because a few years back when those sites where launched MySQL was much faster. Now PostgreSQL is as fast (in many cases even faster) BUT much more robust out of the box (no corruption worries like with MySQL) and more feature rich (FTS etc is betetr in default). I think today when building, the choice is not as one sided in favour of MySQL.
- babul 19y agoInteresting question is if they could do it again today, what they would choose.