I just came across this article published last week from the WikiVS guys. As a web developer I normally use MySQL, however I have been working on some projects recently that MySQL just hasn’t been able to handle because of the sheer number of rows used. The most recent is a program that reads apache log files and allows real time awstats style reporting, as well as comparisons between all websites that are being tracked. As you can imagine, when tracking stats for over a hundred websites, many of which get more than several thousand unique hits a day, the number of rows quickly flew into the millions and that combined with a highly relational structure brought MySQL crying to its knees. Even on an 8 core machine with as many parallel programming techniques that PHP5 would let me lay my hands on!
In jumped PostgreSQL to the rescue, along with my own query caching method and the software was back up and running!
MySQL vs PostgreSQL is a decision many must make when approaching open-source relational databases management systems. Both are time-proven solutions that compete strongly with proprietary database software. MySQL has long been assumed to be the faster but less full-featured of the two database systems, while PostgreSQL was assumed to be a more densely featured database system often described as an open-source version of Oracle. MySQL has been popular among various software projects because of its speed and ease of use, while PostgreSQL has had a close following from developers who come from an Oracle or SQL Server background.
