[consulting] Drupal: MySQL vs. PostgreSQL

[Kevin Davison]

I'm not very familiar with the use of PostgreSQL with Drupal, as I tend to use Pressflow with MySQL on most projects. I read about the advantages and disadvantages, but not sure how to compare a clustered DB with PostgreSQL and Pressfow running on Pantheon with MySQL optimized, perhaps on multiple DB servers. It looks like there are various issues with contributed modules & PostgreSQL, and that doesn't sound like much fun to deal with.

So now I have a potential client who needs help with PostgreSQL in the mix, and I'm not sure if I should get involved.

Here's the client's development/production environment:

Debian Lenny (5.0) host environment
Debian packaging for deployment
Drupal 6 framework
PostgreSQL 8.3 database
Git source control
Apache Solr 1.4 for search and related artist matching
Amazon S3 + CloudFront for storage and streaming of videos
FFMpeg for encoding of uploaded videos
JWPlayer for playback (looking to replace this in a future phase))
Apache and Nginx web servers (although development can be done with just Apache)
PHP 5.2

They know what they're doing!

Here's what I read about PostgreSQL on Drupal.org:

(From http://drupal.org/node/33171)

> First off you have to ask yourself is it really worth it? In most cases no absolutely not, MySQL is just fine for sites that are small and want to remain that way, this includes personal sites and blogs etc.
> 
> PostgreSQL's real strength at least in my opinion comes from its ability to seamlessly cluster, thereby distributing the load among many DB servers rather than bogging down a single server. If you have a big website with lots of traffic and have the resources for multiple servers, then PostgreSQL is definitely the way to go.

This potential client has a lot of data, with the potential for a lot of traffic. Their current configuration may be ideal, as far as I know right now.

And I've been really happy with staging development on WebEnabled, but they don't support PostgreSQL yet. I don't even have PostgreSQL installed on my local development environment!

So I'm asking the Drupal community about this one. Perhaps I need to learn more about PostgreSQL, or I just need to stick with what I know best (as an intermediate at MySQL). And I may need some help from Developers who do know more.

What do you think?

Thank you,

Kevin

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