And with MySQL you throw out ACID or any type of consistency ...
Its design follows the ACID model, with transactions featuring commit, rollback, and crash-recovery capabilities to protect user data.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-storage-engine...
Edit: swapped out Wikipedia for MySQL's official docs.
If I have a varchar(2) and I insert 3 characters in that field - I should expect that to error, not warning and silently truncate (which isn't picked up if you are doing inserts on the application level). I know there are options to turn it into an error - but, that is not the default.
Also, if i screw up a create table, inside a transaction .. i expect that create table to roll back too.
Both things which postgres does perfectly. Not to mention, plpgsql is way easier to write with less stress than whatever horrible extensions to SQL that MySQL has for procs and triggers.
EDIT: My mistake. Apparently I'm not sufficiently familiar with MySQL's revision number practices. According to this: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/news-5-5-x.html#news-... 5.5.x is a production release; I saw an odd minor version and assumed it was dev, since that's what I'm used to everywhere else. My other questions still stand, though.
MyISAM for example supports fulltext indexes by default which was/is probably one of the most useful features for web development which explains why MySQL is so popular in that arena.
Whatever default was selected by MySQL is irrelevant - do your research and pick the right tool for the job.
You should think of them more like separate DBMSs that are tied together in one system. The semantics change depending on the storage engine, so they aren't just drop-in replacements.
"MyISAM for example supports fulltext indexes..."
PostgreSQL has supported full text search for a long time.
What I said was you need to do your research and pick the right tool for the job.
I haven't used PostgreSQL for quite a few years but I think it got built-in support for fulltext indexes in v8.3 (April 2008) whereas MySQL had them in v3.23 (April 2001).
A lot of shared hosting providers/package management systems wouldn't have supported/installed the extra extensions to make PostgreSQL support fulltext indexing prior to it being built-in I suspect.
To be clear, I don't care what you or anyone else uses - I was simply pointing out that just because it was the default engine it didn't mean you had to use it!