Re: MySQL vs postgres

[Jamie McCarthy <jamie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

imago@imago3d.com (imago) writes:

> Why is this? Heavy traffic on web applications, like a real time
> auction, hopefilly will have many concurrent users and overlapping
> sessions working on the same records in the same tables.  Seems to
> me record locking is essential for accuracy and efficienncy.

Web applications typically have a high ratio of reading to writing.
Issues like table locking and transactions affect write speed and
complexity more than reads.  Even a site like Slashdot, which has busy
discussion forums, does SELECT a lot more than INSERT.

Also, performance is the Holy Grail of web apps.  In many other
environments, load can be accurately predicted, but on the web,
anything goes:  it's not unusual for spikes in traffic to be 100 or
1000 times your site's normal load.  Those are precisely the times
when it's both most important and most difficult that your software
have good performance.  Building that speed buffer isn't cheap, and
at high performance levels, a severalfold speedup in software can
save a great deal of money in hardware.

(I'm not in a position to argue one package over another, I've only
ever used MySQL, but you asked!  :-)
--
        Jamie McCarthy
        jamie@mccarthy.org
 http://jamie.mccarthy.org/