[LRUG] Reasons for Postgres (was: Migrating SQLlite to MySQL)

[Tom Morris]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 16:52, Sam Stokes <webstuff-lrug at samstokes.co.uk> wrote:
> Now that you've brought it up :)  Would you be able to list a few things
> that you like about Postgres, or even reasons to use Postgres over MySQL?
>
> I'm not looking for a flamewar (and certainly not intending to defend
> MySQL!) - I'm genuinely curious about Postgres.  It's something I've never
> got around to looking into - MySQL has always been "good enough", since I'm
> already familiar with it - but I'd like to have a reason to try Postgres on
> a new project.
>

I recently evaluated both Postgres and MySQL, and I found:

1. MVCC in Postgres seems a lot less clumsy than the locking model of MySQL

2. tsearch2, the full text search module, means I can turn full-text
search into a stored procedure - and it saved me from having to learn,
install and set up Sphinx/Solr/Lucene/etc. It is pretty nice.

3. Because I can put constraints into the database, I can easily move
away from Rails - if we decide to turn it into a locally-installed
Windows .NET app, say.

4. Postgres has a slight speed disadvantage over MySQL in terms of
read performance - I'm told, I haven't actually tested it - but the
app I'm using has a small number of users who write and edit a *lot*.

Really, tsearch2 was the primary reason I chose postgres. There's also
the politics of Postgres as a project: it's run as a community-driven
open source project, while MySQL has had at least one case of the
development decisions being dictated by the corporate owners (then it
was MySQL AB pushing out 5.0 on general release despite some rather
fundamental bugs).


-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>