On 7/21/10 2:55 PM, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
On Wed, 21 Jul 2010 10:35:48 -0500 "larry@garfieldtech.com"larry@garfieldtech.com wrote:
The decision between MySQL and Postgres should be made primarily based on the existing skillset of your DB admin. Drupal's queries
That's like saying all problems can be solved with a hammer because you're a hammer master. Drupal seems to be so successful because it is a development tool with a really good CMS as an example application ;)
If we want to get into wacky analogies, then that's the wrong one. :-) Hammer vs. screwdriver is using an SQL DB vs. MongoDB. Different tools for different types of problems.
MySQL vs. Postgres is, in most cases, more akin to whether your high-performance car should be a Mercedes or BMW. If you can get parts from your mechanic more easily for the Mercedes, then that's what you want. They're both still nice cars.
It can be wrapped around many other applications... and different applications may have different requirements. Different DB are more suited to different tasks. Maybe you already have an application running on one DB and Drupal is just the web UI.
The fact that the core CMS application doesn't need specific characteristics of any DB doesn't mean it's not legit to develop modules that actually make use of some characteristics that are available to just some of them.
If there's specific edge case functionality you need, sure. But that's a very small edge case, usually site-specific. For general use, either one will work fine if properly configured and tuned (where is where the "what your DB admin knows" comes in).
MySQL doesn't have full text search on InnoDB nor a mature GIS data/index (if any??). I don't know how easy it is to develop C extensions for MySQL (if possible???)... So postgresql for example has dblink, hstore (a sort of EAV), support for trigrams... and you can program your own if you need it (I wrote a simple text similarity extension based on tsearch2 exactly for one of my Drupal projects and I hadn't used C for more than 10 lines in years).
MySQL does have a GIS plugin, although I've never worked with it. I'm pretty sure you can build extensions for it as well, but I have never needed to do that, either.
But now you are talking about extended features of Postgres vs. extended features of MySQL, which is a completely different question than which one performs better at running Drupal.
--Larry Garfield