Comment Re:I strongly disagree (Score 1) 621
True story: I worked for a small company that did both IVR and hosted an e-commerce web site. Our infrastructure was a fairly typical pile of garbarge: mostly SCO and Windows, with a few Red Hat boxes thrown into the mix. The kid in charge of things didn't want to hear about anything other than Postgres. Well, maybe Postgres is better - I didn't work with it long enough to form a definite opinion. (My first impression was that the whole business with keywords was kind of daffy and why was it so hard to figure out how to write the current datetime to a table? What's wrong with "2004042132417"?)
It may be that in theory, Postgres is better. In practice, it sat there and did nothing because the postgress client "pg" (insert obvious joke here) didn't want to run on SCO. Well, obviously , the solution was to get rid of SCO, but easier said than done, we had it. What we didn't have was the money and people necessary to get rid of it.
I used Oyama Hiroyuki's Pure Perl MySQL module on SCO. It worked fine and required no libraries or dependencies beyond the usual stuff like IO::Socket. My system was up and running for months while the Postgres kid and the system administrator sparred over who was responsible.
"Slower than Oracle, MS-SQL, or Foxpro"? By hearsay, everyone I know who runs Oracle on an x86 says it's a dog. I can't speak for MS-SQL. And I can't believe you threw Foxpro in there. I programmed in that stuff for ten years. Unless your idea of joy is race conditions, file corruption, locking problems, and pinning the Disk IO meter I would recommend that you use something else.
I benchmarked some queries, and for what we used it for MySQL was faster as Postgres. I advocate it for the the following reasons:
Speed.
Reliability.
Simplicity, because to be honest with you, we weren't that smart and needed all the help we could get.
Also database replication works better in MySQL than with those Perl scripts bundled with Postgress.
Maybe Postgres is better if you're doing some kind of data mining stuff that really requires brains - I couldn't tell you.
