Re: MySQL,PostgreSQL and dbm.

From: James McIninch (james.mcininch.nospam_at_comcast.net)
Date: 03/10/05 

To: "kernel.lover" <cranium.2003@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:20:15 -0500

<posted & mailed>

kernel.lover wrote:

> Hello,
> I want to know applications and purposes and their diference of
> MySQL,PostgreSQL and dbm.
> Which onw has most popular? are these all free relational databases?

dbm is not a relational database -- it's basically a hash table. There's no
query language, relations, procedures, functions, etc. It's fast and
low-overhead but limited. It's used where a simple hash table is most
approriate.

MySQL is a pseudo-relational database. Depending on the table type you use,
foreign keys may or may not be supported. Regardless, you can perform cross
table joins in SQL as you would expect. MySQL is fairly lightweight, well
supported, and very fast on queries. It supports a fairly simple
authentication scheme and access privileges and a wide array of data types.
It lacks support for complex constraints, triggers, transactions, and
sub-selects. MySQL is popular because it's small and easy to use but is
still very flexible.

PostgreSQL is a relational database that's a little bit more resource
intensive than MySQL but supports foreign keys, triggers, constraints,
user-defined data types, array columns, transactions, stored procedures (in
a number of languages), sub-selects, and more different types of
authentication and finer grained access control. Current versions perform
very well (in my experience, on par with MySQL). Many people are not as
familiar with PostgreSQL as they are with MySQL, but PostgreSQL is quite a
bit more advanced in many respects.

For many, PostgreSQL may be a viable alternative to ORACLE. This is
certainly true for situations where tables may only have a few million
rows. Some features in PostgreSQL are not available in ORACLE yet (array
types, user defined operators, etc.). But, ORACLE is clearly a better
choice for very large scale databases and if you need very specific
functionality only provided in Oracle.

FWIW, I used to be very big on MySQL and use it for all sorts of projects at
work (I am a computational biologist, so I use databases as project-centric
relational data stores for analytical results). Now, I use PostgreSQL
almost exclusively (though all of our large-scale production databases are
done in Oracle). 

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