
State of the Postgres project - blasdel
http://blog.endpoint.com/2010/01/state-of-postgres-project.html
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rufugee
As a long time user of both PostgreSQL and MySQL, I can't begin to compliment
PostgreSQL enough. It runs just about everything in our company, from
ticketing systems to an ERP system with over 1000 users...and it does so
without flinching or making a fuss.

It's stored procedure support is very nice, and allows you to write procedures
in the built in PGPSQL. However, if that syntax doesn't sit well with you, you
can also write them in Tcl, or Perl, or PHP, or Ruby, or Java, or...you get
the idea. Our ERP's stored procedures are all written in Java, for the record.

The stability has been incredible...the community support, wonderful.

And it's really, _really_ free, to boot.

I haven't really faced a lot of the problems others have with MySQL, but
that's probably because for the applications that have mattered, I've always
gone back to PostgreSQL. And the whole commercial/non-commercial licensing FUD
MySQL AB historically spread about when you actually _had_ to buy a license
just left a bad taste in my mouth. I'm ok with buying licenses and am happy
to, but don't enjoy or appreciate that need being fabricated by sales staff.

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forkandwait
I think the PostgreSQL project might become even more robust with the coming
mass defection away from MySQL. Except for easy replication and the ability to
explain it to a know-nothing manager, MySQL has nothing on Postgres these
days.

~~~
Maciek416
Can you explain your comment about "mass defection away from MySQL"? Do you
think that's something that's about to practically happen? Thanks.

~~~
tentonova2
We started making plans to migrate away to PostgreSQL when Oracle embarked on
a clear strategy to buy/control MySQL by purchasing InnoDB, and then
Sleepycat.

There were already plenty of technical justifications to abandon MySQL, but
the potential of dealing with Oracle sealed the business case. From past
experience, Oracle was not a company whose licensing, development, or business
strategy we wanted to be beholden to.

With Oracle now (nearly) owning MySQL proper, the move seems correct. There's
the potential that they'll improve on MySQL, but any significant improvements
will eat at Oracle sales unless they're also countered with licensing changes
or other revenue-boosting strategies -- such as splitting into enterprise/open
source open/closed versions.

Better to use PostgreSQL where we don't need to pay client library licensing
fees, and aren't locked to a vendor.

~~~
spudlyo
You don't need to license the client library anymore now that the BSD licensed
libdrizzle exists. It's a clean room implementation of the client library
written by Eric Day at Sun and is compatible with MySQL server versions >=
4.1.

You also had the option of using the very old public domain licensed version
of the client library, provided you could find it. I believe that RedHat
shipped it at one point.

~~~
rbanffy
BTW, Drizzle appears to be a very good database server. I am currently
evaluating it under various workloads and it seems happy.

It hasn't shown any advantage over MySQL in the tests done so far beyond not
belonging to Oracle.

And for new projects, I do prefer PostgreSQL.

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pilif
Since the end of 2000 (the 7.1 beta period), I'm an avid PostgreSQL user. All
new projects I started were using PostgreSQL and I never had any issues with
that configuration.

Meanwhile, MySQL, which I had running for various third-party products like
Wordpress, required some maintenance here and then, corrupted on-disk table
files (and indexes), produced invalid dumps that were not restorable (and no
warnings about that fact) and annoyed me with the inferior command line tool
(better by now).

One thing I wish PostgreSQL would add is to set a collation order on a
specific index. Right now, in one of my applications, I can't rely on Postgres
doing the sorting, forcing me to retrieve all rows and sort on the client side
which is a) annoying and b) anything but fast.

But whereas earlier, we had to set LC_COLLATE at initdb-time, now we can do it
at createdb time and who knows - maybe we can do it at create index time in
the future? I certainly lack the skill to contribute this particular feature.

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mahmud
Used my Christmas holiday converting my personal database library from MySQL
to Postgres; I have about 10 projects depending on it. I am still ironing out
the small details of the process, but the Lisp ORMs make things easier.

Postgres, keep getting things right, please.

~~~
mattyb
_Used my Christmas holiday converting my personal database library from MySQL
to Postgres_

Why?

~~~
mahmud
Found out the hard way that MySQL not only runs fast, but also fails just as
fast.

~~~
rbanffy
And it also takes your data with it.

All databases need backups, but I don't trust MySQL not to need the restores
too.

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zby
I am a big supporter of the PostgreSQL project, and I have been using it
exclusively for my own projects (recently I started using SQLite for all the
experimental ones) - but competition is a good thing and this schadenfreude
about MySQL problems is not a mature thing.

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forkandwait
Can't somebody (besides me) write an online mysql to postgres schema
converter?

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rbanffy
Relational databases are sooo 20th century...

~~~
wendroid
Well exercised, mature and stable?

