[LRUG] Reasons for Postgres

[Mark Blackman]

On 16/11/2009 17:58, Tom Morris wrote:
> 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*.

I'd say the key thing about Postgres for me is that it feels very 
predictable, where MySQL always seemed to surprise me with what felt
like very odd behaviours and it's never seemed slow. The only genuine
drawback to Postgres that I've ever found, was more replication 
technology options for MySQL

- Mark