These days, Postgres is faster than MySQL+InnoDB, and scales much better across multiple CPU cores. (MyISAM is still faster, but that's not an appropriate compa

These days, Postgres is faster than MySQL+InnoDB, and scales much better across multiple CPU cores. (MyISAM is still faster, but that's not an appropriate comparison.) Some features that make Postgres awesome: * Transactional DDL. You can do "create table" in a transaction. _Everything_ is transactional, it's not a tacked-on feature, it's the basis of everything. * No legacy cruft. Compared to MySQL, which is filled to the brim with historical warts. The Postgres people have been careful to weed out obsolete functionality. There are essentially no sneaky border cases that a developer needs to be aware of, no weird special cases like "0000-00-00 00:00" having special meaning. * No need for a "strict" mode, since Postgres is always strict. Postgres doesn't allow invalid dates, doesn't allow byte sequences that violate character encodings, etc. It diligently enforces contraints and generally doesn't allow you to screw up. To Postgres, data integrity is paramount. * PostGIS. Simply awesome. (MySQL's geospatial stuff also tries to implement the OGC API, but last I looked, it was a half-hearted attempt that negelcted to provide the fast R-tree-based (actually GiST-based) indexing that makes PostGIS so super fast.) * Replication. It's late to the party, but I rather prefer how Postgres has implemented its replication, even though it has some downsides where it will abort a long-running query if some data has changed under its feet (but if you're using transactions it's easy to simply restart the query). 9.1 will be getting synchronous replication, which is pretty cool. * Extensions. Postgres can integrate languages like R and Ruby as first-class languages that can be called from SQL. It also has a module system that can extend the type system (a bit of trivia: This was originally the main reason why Michael Stonebraker invented Postgres) with new types, eg. multidimensional matrix columns, or new features, like remote tables. * The "text" type. Seriously, why should do people keep writing things like varchar(255)? Postgres' text type is an unlimited string. Unlike MySQL's text type, it can be efficiently indexed without limitations. (Varchar is internally implemented as a bounded text type.) * Cost-based planner backed by row-level statistics. This is the stuff that allows Postgres to do complex nested queries and still perform incredibly well. * Partial indexes. You can do something like "create index ... on themes (name) where color = 'blue'". Whenever you do a query that falls within the expressions's range, Postgres will use that index, potentially vastly reducing the search space. * Functional indexes. You can do something like "create index ... on (lower(name))". If you then do a query such as "select ... where lower(name) = 'xyz'", then Postgres will recognize that it's the same expression, and it will be able to use the index. * Windowing functions and recursive queries, both from ANSI SQL99 iirc. Look this up, they're great. There are some bad points, none of them significant and all of them a matter of taste: - I have never really liked Postgres' text indexing, which feels a bit creaky and antique. At least with 8.x, GIN index updating was slow as hell. - Partitioned tables are a great feature, but I will never use it because of the requirement that one does the plumbing yourself (creating partitioning rules and so on); I keep waiting for something like Oracles's automatic partitioning. - Stored procedures -- ie., running logic inside the database -- feels wrong to me, and always has. For some people this is a requirement, so I'm not really complaining. In some cases, writing a stored procedure can be essential to speed up queries/operations by saving on database roundtrips. - Still no "upsert" SQL command (aka "insert or replace", "insert or update") for asserting the existence of a row atomically.