[clue-tech] MySQL vs. Postgres: Was additional study groups ...

[Matt Gushee]

Very interesting commentary ... thanks.

Collins Richey wrote:

> Doesn't help that big blog and search sites use MySQL.  But who cares
> if you get data corruption on a blog containing a bunch of idiots
> non-sensical comments?  Or if you're running a farm of 1000 MySL
> servers that monitor and rebuild each other if one gets
> corrupted/outdated data?

... implying that (as I thought) MySQL is a reasonable choice for a
typical (non-e-commerce) Web application, but not suitable for serious
enterprise apps.

> [ note from Collins: the same responder has always maintained that
> data corruption is more likely with MySQL than Postgres, especially
> where multiple tables are in use. ]

Yes, multiple tables. Personally, I've never really understood why you
would use an RDBMS without using multiple tables. And one reason I've
long preferred PostgreSQL is that in the past it had all the foreign key
support, etc., that MySQL lacked. Now, I'm by no means a database pro,
but I create a lot of databases for various projects, and I have *never*
created one with just one table, and hardly ever created a
non-normalized one ... I suppose I did a few times, in the beginning,
but quickly realized there was something wrong with that--long before I
ever encountered the term "normalization." Guess I just naturally think
in a database-friendly way.

But anyway, one scenario I've heard from somewhere is that you might
deploy MySQL on your Web server, because it's fast, but that database is
 really just an external view of your real database, which would live
behind the firewall on a Postgres/Oracle/etc. server. It sounded
sensible at the time.

-- 
Matt Gushee
The Reluctant Geek: http://matt.gushee.net/rg/
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