Obviously it depends on what you are doing. However, if you are trying to keep everything in one consistent environment it does win out.
Also I expect that with 9.2 we will probably see a release of Postgres-XC which will kick the pants off any MySQL sharding solution out there.
Postgres-XC is a way to abstract database shards such that referential integrity etc. is enforced between shards. The best comparison to date would be to Teradata's clustering system. Better yet, Postgres-XC is just a set of patches on PostgreSQL, and is on-the-wire compatible, so you can swap it out when your database gets too big. This will also bring an ability to concurrently query different shards and aggregate the results without the application having to know anything about the sharding....
Definitely. When your application needs hundreds of read slaves in order to scale the load, PostgreSQL has always been everyone's first choice due to it's mature and historically awesome replication system. That's why companies who need to scale big (YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Twitter etc) all have hundreds (if not thousands) of PostgreSQL machines in their infrastructure.
Im going to assume this is sarcasm since Facebook is built entirely on sharded MySQL. Don't want anyone else to get confused in case it doesn't come through for them.
Facebook, et al, use memcache and a plethora of other products to improve the scalability of MySQL. Here's one scalability comparison between the two:
http://tweakers.net/reviews/649/7
That is a comparison from 2006 using MySQL 5.0.20 (ancient!) and as such is completely irrelevant to any discussion on performance in 2012. Dramatic scalability improvements went into late 5.1.x releases, and then even more in 5.5.
The fact that everybody uses a particular technology does not in fact answer the question of which scales better or which cannot scale. I don't know about others here, but I would welcome actual objective information on this topic rather than sarcasm and an appeal to popularity.
The fact that everybody uses a particular technology does not in fact answer the question of which scales better or which cannot scale.
The fact that many large companies and organizations have successfully scaled a particular technology is a useful yardstick, and while it does little to answer the question of which scales better, it does, by the process of elimination, help answer the question of which cannot scale.
I don't know about others here, but I would welcome actual objective information on this topic rather than sarcasm and an appeal to popularity.
I had hoped that others here would enjoy the sarcasm in the context of the full-throated yet fact-free advocacy of the parent, the text of which somehow still remains legible on an off-white background.
The technology stacks for these companies, by and large, were selected a decade ago or more. I'm no more surprised they chose MySQL as their database as I am to see that they chose PHP or Java as their core language (in some cases).
