On Wed, May 10, 2000 at 06:15:27PM -0400, Chris Wagner wrote: > At 11:36 AM 5/10/00 +0200, Dariush Pietrzak wrote: > >btw, why do you choose mysql? it ain't free, it ain't any good > >try Oracle, Sybase, PostgresSQl, > >they are ok, and Postgres is free > > MySQL is faster and I believe easier.
it's faster for some things, but i find it really clumsy and difficult to work with. postgres' psql is vastly superior to the mysql admin tool - and from what i hear, psql is supposed to be even better in the new version 7. mysql has some nice date manipulation functions built in, but they're nothing that can't be done with postgres functions - i ended up re-writing most of the useful ones for postgres (a few months ago when i spent a week or two porting slash from mysql to postgres - I lost interest and gave up when i discovered that the bugs i was running into WEREN'T due to my port, but were in slash itself) > I doubt he would need transactions just to log Web stats. true, but sub-selects could be useful. the important thing is that postgres is plenty fast enough, it's free, and has a much better feature set - which means you're far less likely to run into some stupid limitation in the future, or suddenly discover that you really need some feature which is missing. triggers and stored procedures can also be useful - set a trigger to automatically update a different table whenever some event occurs...e.g. a user-tracking counter or stats summary table. can save a lot of time in post-processing the logs. mysql may be faster in raw speed for some operations (notably, batch inserts & updates of records), but postgres more than makes up for it in "smart speed". craig -- craig sanders