[Mimedefang] Off Topic - Mail Message and MySQL

[David F. Skoll]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Phil Eschallier wrote:

> Did you elect to have the filter update the RDBMS, or do you use some form
> of post processing?

It happens at filter time.

> As a the architect of a commercial software product, I think it would be of
> great value to get some idea of what went into your selection of PostgreSQL
> (over MySQL or any of the other freely available RDBMS-like servers).  Did
> you favor its feature-set?  Did MySQL's change in licensing impact you?

I chose PostgreSQL over MySQL for a number of reasons.  Here they are in
no particular order:

1) I'm much more familiar with PostgreSQL than MySQL.

2) PostgreSQL's license is a little friendlier for non-free software.
Honestly, this isn't much of a factor, but it's there.  And it did
make a difference in one large deal that I'm not allowed to talk about
yet. :-)

3) We use features like transactions, advanced date/time datatypes,
and subselects.  MySQL now has most of these features, but didn't a year
ago.

My impressions of the two databases (remember, I'm very familiar with
PostgreSQL and only slightly familiar with MySQL) are that PostgreSQL is
a more "industrial strength" database that scales better, especially when
you're reading and writing a lot.  MySQL seems to do well on read-mostly
Web sites, but not so well on sites with heavy transactions.

PostgreSQL has downsides: The concept of VACUUM sucks (sorry :-)) and
if you're not careful, your indexes can grow huge.  It also doesn't
support clustering or replication unless you pay big bucks for a
commercial server.

If we ever need to support an additional database for performance or
clustering reasons, it will probably be Oracle or DB2 or some other
"big-boy" database.

I didn't look at other free DB servers because I was happy enough with
PostgreSQL.  (Btw, the http://www.mimedefang.org/ web site runs on
PostgreSQL.)

--
David.