PostgreSQL has to be one of the best kept open source secrets. I'm so tired of the attitude that if MySQL does not work for you, then you have to throw out a relational database entirely and run with one of these klugy NoSQL things. From everything I have seen the last few years, PostgreSQL will scale across multiple CPUs, where MySQL will not, due to differences in the locking mechanisms. To say nothing of the lagging feature impoverishment of MySQL. Yes, MySQL sucks less now, but how long did they simply not bother to implement transactions at all (no rollback, no isolation)? How long until they had stored procedures? Referential integrity to avoid dangling foreign keys?
Open source databases would have never gotten to where they are if there weren't two top-notch competing projects. Without MySQL, PostgreSQL developers would have probably not as heavily focused on performance. Without PostgreSQL, MySQL would have languished in MyISAM or broken InnoDB world forever.
MySQL would have languished in MyISAM or broken InnoDB world forever.
Ahem. Not to rain on anyone's parade but in my world InnoDB is still broken.
I maintain quite a few production MySQLs and they blow up with great regularity.
Usually it hits individual tables, sometimes (gladly more rarely since the 5 series) it suddenly feels insecure about the contents of ibdata altogether. And no, it's not the hardware.
Anecdote needed?
Just last week we had to drop/re-create an InnoDB-table in one project because it would not allow to add an index anymore, no matter what we tried. If some MySQL expert around here can shed some light, I'm all ear, the error message was:
Mysql::Error: Incorrect key file for table 'foo'; try to repair it: CREATE INDEX [...]
Google revealed a handful of familiar sounding bug-reports mentioning column-renames, which the table had indeed undergone, but nothing really helpful, so we resorted to the drop/create sledgehammer.
Gladly that worked. This time. And every time I wonder why people can't just use PostgreSQL, where such issues (believe it or not) simply don't exist.
