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Poll: What database does your company use?

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Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#201

Post by jleader »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #190
rosser wrote: post #79

I'd vote for PostgreSQL multiple times if I could. I'm a consultant DBA (-ish; I do other stuff as well, but that's what puts most of the food on my table), and have multiple clients using pg.

Why do you use pgsql over mysql? I've used mysql a lot, and pgsql a little. I can't tell the difference, other than pgsql being slower and having less support. Some people swear by it, so I'm curious what I am missing.

My impression (having used mysql at a number of jobs over the years, and talked several very sharp pgsql fans) was that pgsql used to have a big lead in cool features that mysql didn't have. That lead has been eroding, but I don't think mysql is 100% caught up, though I could be wrong. In any case, even when mysql had implemented the various cool features, pgsql's implementations naturally tended to be more mature and stable for a while.

Disclaimer: I don't think of myself as a database guy, and I couldn't give you a definitive list of the differences. I remember some times in the past when things like transactions, triggers, and stored procedures were on the list of differences the pgsql fans quoted to me.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#202

Post by nandemo »

kahawe wrote: post #145

Is it possible HN has a very strong bias on web developers? Because in "serious business" or at least in my case in finance, you almost always find Oracle and DB2 being the leading DBs and maybe Sybase and maybe-maybe mysql or mssql but hardly ever postgre no matter how awesome it is and definitely never-ever something hip and cool and latest-fashion/fad like Mongo or Couch.

I think the bias is huge. In my experience, if you go thru current job listings for developers you'll find a ton of mentions of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL and, to a lesser extent, DB2 and PostgreSQL (though of course job ads are biased too).

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#203

Post by lawnchair_larry »

dgallagher wrote: post #197
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you use pgsql over mysql? I've used mysql a lot, and pgsql a little. I can't tell the difference, other than pgsql being slower and having less support. Some people swear by it, so I'm curious what I am missing.

I personally picked PostgreSQL instead of MySQL since I don't trust Oracle. Why support a free database server when it competes with Oracle RDBMS? Granted Oracle RDBMS is extremely expensive, but still, something doesn't sit well with me...

This is a good point, but only became the case fairly recently. I might lean towards pgsql in the future based on that, actually.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#204

Post by grncdr »

grourk wrote: post #149
jamwt wrote: post #70

Riak! We're ( http://bu.mp ) using more Riak every day. So far so good.

Ditto ( http://dropc.am ). Very write heavy load for us, which Riak handles without blinking. Fault tolerant, robust, and easy to administer. Every machine is identical, no special "master" nodes or anything like that.

I've heard this about Riak and I was quite excited to test it out for a new project, but in the limited testing I've done Cassandra and HBase both absolutely smoke Riak in terms of write performance. Not really apples to apples I suppose, but I was really surprised at how slow Riak was when handling many (millions) of small writes.

We haven't finished our testing/profiling phase yet, so any hints on how to optimize a large number of small writes (on the order of ~dozen bytes each) would be appreciated.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#207

Post by mmphosis »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #190
rosser wrote: post #79

I'd vote for PostgreSQL multiple times if I could. I'm a consultant DBA (-ish; I do other stuff as well, but that's what puts most of the food on my table), and have multiple clients using pg.

Why do you use pgsql over mysql? I've used mysql a lot, and pgsql a little. I can't tell the difference, other than pgsql being slower and having less support. Some people swear by it, so I'm curious what I am missing.

Atomic transactions, perhaps at the expense of pgsql being slower.

Subqueries, but we don't require this in production.

Wariness of Oracle's conflict of interest.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#209

Post by jacques_chester »

espeed wrote: post #5

You should add the Neo4j ( http://neo4j.org/ ) graph database to the list. Graphs are a much more modern and elegant way of storing relational data. I've used Postgres for over 10 years, but it's not a graph database. With graph databases you don't have to mess with tables or joins -- everything is implicitly joined. And Neo4j is ridiculously sweet -- store 32 billion nodes ( http://blog.neo4j.org/2011/03/neo4j-13-ab…

> Graphs are a much more modern and elegant way of storing relational data.

Actually, storing data as graphs is older than relational approaches. It used to be called "network databases". They were not supplanted for the hell of it, relational databases have certain advantages.

For select applications, object databases are absolutely the way to go. But for most purposes relational is hard to beat.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#210

Post by jacques_chester »

msluyter wrote: post #19

I'm surprised to see that Oracle even has as many mentions as it does, given how rarely you read about it here on HN. We're locked into it at my workplace, and every time I'm reminded of this PG quote I cringe a little: "The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous was the company. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those."

Oracle is all over the place. My daily bread-and-butter relies on Oracle. For some thing it is, as I like to say, more 1980s than Top Gun crossed with Duran Duran -- still no SQL boolean type after 30 years! -- but for other things it has no peer except DB2, Sybase and SQL Server.
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