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Comment by rimantas | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, pretty much every system has insane things in it. Is postgresql an exception?

Certainly not! However, its WTFs per minute count is far lower than MySQL.

I started off my career as a PHP/MySQL developer. PostgreSQL is definitely years ahead of MySQL. It used to be that MySQL had far superior read performance for simple queries, but that hasn't been true since around 2006. Also Postgres' SQL optimiser is really good.

  > PostgreSQL is definitely years ahead of MySQL

I guess this does not apply to replication, upserts, etc. Well, I think I will just grab some popcorn and wait. It will be fun to watch how those who never bothered to learn MySQL (and by this I don't only mean its peculiarities) will get bitten for not bothering to learn PostgreSQL.

Why? Because you think everything is equal, everything has its own gotchas and not one is better than the other?

That is against all history, not only in software. Postgres is obvectively better (safer, better engineered, easier to use, etc.) than MySql, just as Python is objectively better than PHP, and an AK47 was better than most other assault rifles of its time.

The lack of upserts is a problem in postgres, as much as some people say they can get away without them. There are objective concurrency issues with the lack of it, that have been acknowledged by postgres developers when they started work on upserts.

may be a problem, there are workarounds, and workloads where it is not required, but I agree, merge/upsert is a much anticipated enhancement.

> There are objective concurrency issues with the lack of it, that have been acknowledged by postgres developers when they started work on upserts.

These concurrency issues don't fully go away by adding the feature, which is why it is taking time to work out the desired behavior there.

I find the official documentation to be superior for postgres (YMMV), but I think there are certainly more examples / blogs / tutorials for MySQL.

I prefer to work with Postgres when I can, but I also have found instances where MySQL better fit my needs, a heap table, even with more recently added index only scans ( and even reordering the table with cluster may not be desirable) you may want an index organized table (oracle term ) (mysql would say clustered index )

I am curious why even in the context of freely available engines we focus on competition, which I think can lead to great things, but I don't understand the animosity the communities feel towards one another, isn't it just a matter of horses for courses? Are we really interested in competitive kills or improving both the tools we use and our understanding thereof ?

I don't mean to single your comment out gbog, and I know this is certainly not exclusive to databases either ( witness almost any discussion of various programming languages on HN )

in at least some cases, animosity comes from people who've have to clean up someone else's exploded mess in the tech of their targeted derision.

I do think many (most?) people are interested in seeing all tools get 'better' over time, but what needs to be improved, or how it should be improved, often don't get agreed on.

The MySQL clustered index (and Oracle IOT) are, in my opinion, often over looked powerful features. To pick an example I recently encountered ... I have an Rails app to implement a RSS reader. Each user has many feeds that get added over time. If you cluster the feeds on user_id then all the feeds for a given user will be in a single database block or two, so reading them out is super efficient. If they are in a standard heap table, (or the way Rails creates the table by default, clustered on ID), then reading the list of N feeds could require N database block reads in the extreme case. Same goes for all articles on a given feed - cluster the related articles together and its very efficient to find the most recent articles for a feed.

i don't think you know what objectively means.

In my experience, it has fewer "insane things in it" than MySQL.

PostgreSQL is no exception, but hey I do insane things with the db so I suppose it is fitting that I occasionally (but rarely) run into insane aspects of the system.

The difference is, you don't have to do crazy things to run into truly insane behavior on MySQL ;-)

Postgres may not be perfect, but it's certainly not as consistently dopey as MySQL.

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