Re: [PLUG] ISP's and db's

["Brent R. Matzelle" <bmatzelle@yahoo.com>]

I'm not an ISP guy but I can think of a couple possible reasons
for this.  First, MySQL is more "commercial" than PostgreSQL. 
It has a very polished set of SQL commands that would ordinarily
require data dumps in Postgres (e.g. Postgres doesn't have ALTER
TABLE <table> ADD COLUMN <new_column> AFTER <existing_column>). 
Also, in the past there was commercial support for MySQL
(T.C.X.).  There were some past problems with data integrity in
Postgres.  Plus, administrators like it because it has a very
small memory footprint and ran queries much faster than
Postgres.  And personally, there weren't any technical Postgres
books to reference (a must for me).

However, things definitely have changed.  Since the 7.0 release
of Postgres there is now support (Great Bridge), the data
integrity problems haven't been a problem, and the speed has
increased dramatically.  In fact, there have been benchmarks
done that suggest that when there is a lot of read/write
activity on a database that MySQL dies after man clients (around
90), while Postgres keeps on chugging well over 100 clients. 
Also, just recently a PostgreSQL book hit the shelves, and
there's another due in the next couple months.  

I figure that hosting providers will start to use Postgres more
and more in the future.  I myself have turned from MySQL to
Postgres for all web development that requires transactions and
lots of read/write activity.  However, I will only use dedicated
server providers like Rackspace for these sites as shared
hosting doesn't currently support Postgres.  

Brent

--- Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com> wrote:
> Can any of our ISP folks shed some light on why ISP's
> generally prefer
> to run MySQL instead of PostgreSQL?
> 
> (The former is essentially a SQL interface to your file system
> with a
> few frills. The second is pretty much a real database. There
> are
> important data integrity things I just don't think you can do
> in
> MySQL.)
> 
> Tia for any light shed.
> 
> -- 
>  Jeff
> 
>  Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>
> 
> 
> 
>
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