« The alternative to hating us | Home | Amazon's RSS feeds »
March 17, 2004
MySQL v. PostgreSQL
A comparison of PostgreSQL vs MySQL. While this leans towards MySQL we are favoring PostgreSQL. Here's part of the reason why:
Here PostgreSQL has the upper hand. The stable version of MySQL does not support subqueries, stored procedures, subqueries, cursors or views, all of which PostgreSQL does. One of their more serious mistakes was for the MySQL developers to justify the exclusion of many of these features (and even more fundamental features such as referential integrity, still only partially integrated) by claiming that they were not necessary. Of course this is true in many cases, but to hardened DBA's many of these features are vital, and this lack gave MySQL a reputation as a 'toy' database, from which it is still recovering today.
Why don't you take a look at Firebird? It has all of these features and more... Since the source code came from a mature commercial database it has good pedigree. Firebird is in many ways better than MySQL and PostgreSQL. BTW, I haven't read the article yet, but I'm heading there now... :-)