Why is MySQL more chosen over PostgreSQL?
Just a long standing curiosity?
For most web sites MySQL seems to work fine, but overall PostgreSQL offers
more capabilites so why build upon a limited base such as MySQL?
Does anyone here have any idea as to why so many people select MySQL when
both systems are open sourced?
Matthew
Just a long standing curiosity?
For most web sites MySQL seems to work fine, but overall PostgreSQL offers
more capabilites so why build upon a limited base such as MySQL?Does anyone here have any idea as to why so many people select MySQL when
both systems are open sourced?
Three likely effects:
a) ISP management toolsets include management tools for MySQL, and not
PostgreSQL.
(CPanel is an example of such a toolset.)
b) Apparently the permissions model for PostgreSQL used to discourage its use
in shared hosting environments. (Ask Neil Conway more about this.)
c) There was corporate sponsorship of MySQL, and they probably spent money
marketing it in the ISP web hosting market.
d) MySQL is GPL-licensed, and some people consider that very important. (And
are too stupid to grasp that they like XFree86, which _isn't_ licensed under
the GPL... Of course, this is d), and I said "three" likely effects...)
e) Inertia. MySQL got more popular way back when; the reasons may no longer
apply, but nobody is going to move to PostgreSQL without _compelling_ reason,
and you'll have to show something _really compelling_.
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On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com wrote:
[snip]
e) Inertia. MySQL got more popular way back when; the reasons may no longer
apply, but nobody is going to move to PostgreSQL without _compelling_ reason,
and you'll have to show something _really compelling_.
I would like to add one other thought. There are many web site designers
that get thrust into being a web site programmer. Without an
understanding of database design and a novice programmers (?) view of the
process the benefits of letting the database (RDBMS) do the database work
isn't recognized. They code it all in the CGI.
Rod
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Matthew Tedder <matthew@tedder.com> wrote:
For most web sites MySQL seems to work fine, but overall PostgreSQL offers
more capabilites so why build upon a limited base such as MySQL?
Does anyone here have any idea as to why so many people select MySQL when
both systems are open sourced?
Some people working on win32 platforms, and mysql easy install on win32.
Just for starting on use databases in soft.
PgSQL easy-install on *unix-systems (mostly..:)), but on win32 ..it's hard..:(
IMHO.
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well that and people tend to drift towards an easy answer,
like php... amazing how that combo is so popular... hrrmm...
Roderick A. Anderson writes:
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002 cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com wrote:
[snip]
e) Inertia. MySQL got more popular way back when; the reasons may no longer
apply, but nobody is going to move to PostgreSQL without _compelling_ reason,
and you'll have to show something _really compelling_.I would like to add one other thought. There are many web site designers
that get thrust into being a web site programmer. Without an
understanding of database design and a novice programmers (?) view of the
process the benefits of letting the database (RDBMS) do the database work
isn't recognized. They code it all in the CGI.Rod
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Development InfoStructure
540.366.9809
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Chris Humphries wrote:
well that and people tend to drift towards an easy answer,
like php... amazing how that combo is so popular... hrrmm...
Well people seem to get so ... about php that I didn't want to touch that
topic.
Rod
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"Open Source Software - Sometimes you get more than you paid for..."
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
I would like to add one other thought. There are many web site
designers that get thrust into being a web site programmer. Without
an understanding of database design and a novice programmers (?) view
of the process the benefits of letting the database (RDBMS) do the
database work isn't recognized. They code it all in the CGI.
Well, I'll add two points to this, then:
1. Often there's a lot more benefit to moving the work from the database
to the application structure. Database schemas are hard to change, and
hard to keep under revision control. When I was doing a large website,
it was much, much easier to say "everything goes through these Java
classes" than "everything goes through the database." I could change the
database schema at will and know that my data was safe, because I could
have old interfaces running simultaneously with new.
(Though I'll admit, good view support would have mitigated this problem
quite a lot. But there is *no* database in the world that has really
good view support; they all fail on various updates where one can
theoretically do the Right Thing, but in practice it's very difficult.
And I don't think that's going to change any time soon.)
2. I expect that even most PostgreSQL--or even database--experts don't
have a real understanding of relational theory, anyway. That we still
have table inheritance shows that. As far as I can tell, there is
nothing whatsoever that table inheritance does that the relational model
does not handle; the whole "OO" thing is just another, redundant way of
doing what we already ought to be able to do within the relational model.
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.
All that said, though, don't take this as any kind of a dismissal of
postgres. It's in most ways better than MySQL and also some commericial
systems, and many of its failures are being addressed. Postgres for some
reason seems to attract some really, really smart people to work on it.
If I could see something better, I'd be there. But I don't.
cjs
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Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.
We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
All that said, though, don't take this as any kind of a dismissal of
postgres. It's in most ways better than MySQL and also some commericial
systems, and many of its failures are being addressed. Postgres for some
reason seems to attract some really, really smart people to work on it.
If I could see something better, I'd be there. But I don't.
Interbase/Firebird maybe? They just came out with a 1.0 release in
March.
As for why PostgreSQL is less popular than MySQL, I think it is all
momentum from 1996 when MySQL worked and we sometimes crashed. Looking
forward, I don't know many people who choose MySQL _if_ they consider
both PostgreSQL and MySQL, so the discussions people have over MySQL vs.
PostgreSQL are valuable because they get people to consider MySQL
alternatives, and once they do, they usually choose PostgreSQL.
As for momentum, we still have a smaller userbase than MySQL, but we are
increasing our userbase at a fast rate, perhaps faster than MySQL at
this point.
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Bruce Momjian wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
...
As for why PostgreSQL is less popular than MySQL, I think it is all
momentum from 1996 when MySQL worked and we sometimes crashed. Looking
forward, I don't know many people who choose MySQL _if_ they consider
both PostgreSQL and MySQL, so the discussions people have over MySQL vs.
PostgreSQL are valuable because they get people to consider MySQL
alternatives, and once they do, they usually choose PostgreSQL.As for momentum, we still have a smaller userbase than MySQL, but we are
increasing our userbase at a fast rate, perhaps faster than MySQL at
this point.
Its all due to sort-order. If Oracle was open source MySQL would still
be more popular. ;-)
Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
Ah, all the more reason to remove it, then! :-)
But really, please don't take that as a criticism of the current development
direction; I know it was inherited, and it's not new code. In fact, I think
it probably wasn't until _The Third Manifsto_ came out in 1998 that it
really became clear that table inheritance was not terribly useful--if it's
even generally known now. And even so, I'm open to other opinions on that,
since it's not been an intensive area of study by any means.
All that said, though, don't take this as any kind of a dismissal of
postgres. It's in most ways better than MySQL and also some commericial
systems, and many of its failures are being addressed. Postgres for some
reason seems to attract some really, really smart people to work on it.
If I could see something better, I'd be there. But I don't.Interbase/Firebird maybe? They just came out with a 1.0 release in March.
Once in a while I go back to it, but I still can't build the darn thing
from scratch. Which makes it a bit difficult to evaluate....
As for why PostgreSQL is less popular than MySQL, I think it is all
momentum from 1996 when MySQL worked and we sometimes crashed.
Right. I have a lot of hope. After all, MySQL was for a couple of
years a second-runner to mSQL, remember?
cjs
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Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 19:01, Curt Sampson wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jul 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.
It is mostly a syntactic thing that makes it easier to humans to write
cleaner code.
Otherwise, it is proved that anything can be written for a Turing
Machine ;)
We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.Ah, all the more reason to remove it, then! :-)
It would make more sense to make it compatible with SQL99 and drop the
current behaviour only after that if possible.
As it stands now it is a strange mix of SQL99's
CREATE TABLE thistable(...,LIKE anothertable,...);
and
CREATE table mytable(...) UNDER anothertable;
with only a few additional goodies, like SELECT* (i.e not ONLY) which
selects from all tables that inherit from this.
other things that should be done are not (like inheriting constraints,
foreign and primary keys, triggers, ...)
Also we currently can't return more than one recordset from a query,
which also makes selecting from an inheritance hierarchy less versatile.
-----------
Hannu
As for why PostgreSQL is less popular than MySQL, I think it is all
momentum from 1996 when MySQL worked and we sometimes crashed. Looking
forward, I don't know many people who choose MySQL _if_ they consider
both PostgreSQL and MySQL, so the discussions people have over MySQL vs.
PostgreSQL are valuable because they get people to consider MySQL
alternatives, and once they do, they usually choose PostgreSQL.As for momentum, we still have a smaller userbase than MySQL, but we are
increasing our userbase at a fast rate, perhaps faster than MySQL at
this point.
I think the fact that the PHP guys _pride_ themselves on having built-in
MySQL support is another huge reason. They look at it is an example of what
can be achieved with integration. The FreeBSD PHP port, as another example,
has 'MySQL support' ticked by default. Not quite so much work is put into
PHP's PostgreSQL support as MySQL's, so it's often buggy (tell me about it).
Also, the utter lack of knowledge about relational theory and SQL is a
factor in both newbies and self-taught developers. For instance, in the
last few days I have answered questions like these on PHP Builder:
"I use SELECT * FROM table WHERE a = 3. How do I get all rows? Can I put a
= ALL or something?"
"Why don't my javascript variables work in my SQL statements?"
"I have two tables and a referencing ID, and I keep getting rows in my child
table that don't match a row in the parent table, what is a query that I can
run regularly to remove these problem rows?"
...and so on...
Why would someone asking the above questions use anything other than the
'default' PHP database?
Chris
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On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 14:51, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
Bruce Momjian:
It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
That's one reason.
Seems like somewhat valid reason. But still not enough to do a lot of
work _and_ annoy a lot of existing users :)
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything. and
there is nothing whatsoever that table inheritance does that the
relational model does not handleThat's the other one.
That's quite bogus imho. You could just as well argue that there is
nothing that relational model handles that can't be done in pure C.
----------------
Hannu
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On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 18:30, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
How about dropping it, then?
Just start to emit
WARNING: inheritance will be dropped with postgres 8.0
WARNING: please refer to http://.../ for an explanation why.
right now on every CREATE TABLE that uses it.
cheers
-- vbi
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We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.How about dropping it, then?
Just start to emit
WARNING: inheritance will be dropped with postgres 8.0
WARNING: please refer to http://.../ for an explanation why.right now on every CREATE TABLE that uses it.
Why? It doesn't hurt you personally! Plus, it would annoy a _boatload_ of
existing inheritance users.
A more interesting question I think is how to allow our indexes to span
multiple relations, _without_ causing any performance degradation for non
inheritance users...
Chris
[don't cc: me, please.]
[please leave proper attribution in]
On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 10:45, Christopher Kings-Lynne wrote:
We inherited inheritance from Berkeley. I doubt we would have added it
ourselves. It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
[Inheritance]
How about dropping it, then?
[...]
Why? It doesn't hurt you personally!
That's correct.
Plus, it would annoy a _boatload_ of
existing inheritance users.
Bruce Momjian:
It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
That's one reason.
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.
and
there is nothing whatsoever that table inheritance does that the
relational model does not handle
That's the other one.
cheers
-- vbi
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On 30 Jul 2002, Hannu Krosing wrote:
On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 14:51, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
Bruce Momjian:
It causes too much complexity in other parts of the system.
That's one reason.
Seems like somewhat valid reason. But still not enough to do a lot of
work _and_ annoy a lot of existing users :)
It's almost unquestionably more work to maintain than to drop. Dropping
support for it is a one-time operation. Maintaining it is an ongoing
expense.
That's quite bogus imho. You could just as well argue that there is
nothing that relational model handles that can't be done in pure C.
That's a straw man argument. What we (or I, anyway) are arguing is that
the relational model does everything that table inheritance does, and at
least as easily. Extending the model adds complexity without adding the
ability to do things you couldn't easily do before. (This, IMHO, makes
table inheritance quite inelegant.)
cjs
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Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
On 29 Jul 2002, Hannu Krosing wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.It is mostly a syntactic thing that makes it easier to humans to write
cleaner code.
And how is using table inheritance "cleaner" than doing it the
relational way? It adds extra complexity to the system, which is
automatically a reduction in cleanliness, so it would have to have
some correspondingly cleanliness-increasing advantages in order
to be cleaner, overall.
cjs
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Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
* Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder <avbidder@fortytwo.ch> [020730 04:20]:
On Mon, 2002-07-29 at 18:30, Bruce Momjian wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.
I think one of the values of it is that it is something that no one else
has. It distinguishes us.
--
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On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 13:46, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:
Curt Sampson wrote:
I'm still waiting to find out just what advantage table inheritance
offers. I've asked a couple of times here, and nobody has even started
to come up with anything.I think one of the values of it is that it is something that no one else
has. It distinguishes us.
Coooool. Let's have the 'automatically phone KFC if developer works more
than 8 hours non-stop' feature, *that* is something nobody else has.
Yes. Cool.
In other words: this is an absolutely bogus argument.
As an implementor I'm always wary of using features nobody else has,
especially in databases. So, if I'd want postgres to have one thing
nobody else has, it would be the most complete standard SQL
implementation - so it would at least be the other products' fault if
I'd have to do any special porting work to/from postgres.
cheers
-- vbi
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