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While this is somewhat more subjective, documentation and tutorials I've read for PostgreSQL consistently seem better informed about relational databases than M

While this is somewhat more subjective, documentation and tutorials I've read for PostgreSQL consistently seem better informed about relational databases than MySQL's. I keep seeing cases where somebody is having performance issues with MySQL, and it turns out they neglected to do something basic like indexing their tables. This is probably partially due to its reputation of being good for the web, and thus getting a used by a lot of people who kinda-sorta know PHP but know nothing about the relational paradigm, but MySQL also has a history of ignoring fundamental relational concepts (http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/764fp/mysql_vs_postgresql/c05sayb http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/764fp/mysql_vs_...), so it's not a coincidence. Also, it irritates me when people write off relational databases because of a bad experience naively using MySQL, but that's neither here nor there. You should probably program for a neutral wrapper and do actual testing to determine which will work better for you, though. I like PostgreSQL, and have had very good results with it, but I've never come close to needing the sort of dramatic scalability that people seem to worry so much about.

olefoo 18y ago
> I've never come close to needing the sort of dramatic scalability that people seem to worry so much about. s/worry/fantasize/
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  I actually went back and forth on the wording, there. I decided "fantasize" sounded a bit too harsh -- some people are probably just underestimating how much one RDBMS can handle, due to a combination of buzz about scalability issues and bad experiences running databases without indexes, normalized tables, etc.
  - olefoo 18y ago
    Well, a lot of people here think that their web-delivered software as a service offering is going to be an instant mega-success and they will need to scale up to meet 100k requests per second in the first day. The truth is a much more pedestrian than that. For one thing, outages can be good publicity; I'm willing to bet many more people heard about twitter because of people bitching about it being than any other reason. For another, you should never look further than one order of magnitude ahead when scaling a web app because the load profile changes too unpredictably as you climb the curve; you can't tell what 100k visits/hr looks like from 1k visits/hr but at 1k v/h you probably have a good idea of what will kill you at 10k.

olefoo 18y ago

> I've never come close to needing the sort of dramatic scalability that people seem to worry so much about. s/worry/fantasize/

silentbicycle 18y ago
I actually went back and forth on the wording, there. I decided "fantasize" sounded a bit too harsh -- some people are probably just underestimating how much one RDBMS can handle, due to a combination of buzz about scalability issues and bad experiences running databases without indexes, normalized tables, etc.
- olefoo 18y ago
  Well, a lot of people here think that their web-delivered software as a service offering is going to be an instant mega-success and they will need to scale up to meet 100k requests per second in the first day. The truth is a much more pedestrian than that. For one thing, outages can be good publicity; I'm willing to bet many more people heard about twitter because of people bitching about it being than any other reason. For another, you should never look further than one order of magnitude ahead when scaling a web app because the load profile changes too unpredictably as you climb the curve; you can't tell what 100k visits/hr looks like from 1k visits/hr but at 1k v/h you probably have a good idea of what will kill you at 10k.