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Poll: What database does your company use?

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Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#331

Post by alextingle »

ibejoeb wrote: post #143
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."

I'm probably starting to sound like a broken record around here, but: 1. I build products on Oracle at a startup. 2. Oracle has many compelling features that really don't have first-class open source alternatives: OLAP, encryption (wire and at-rest), VPD, materialized views with query rewriting, object and document storage, monitoring and tracing, among others... 3. Oracle got more compelling since being offered--lic…

It is perplexing that Microsoft (presumably SQL-Server) has got so many votes. In my experience, absolutely nobody chooses to use it. They just have aggressive sales people who use it as a bargaining chip to elbow out Oracle and help win other business.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#332

Post by mgkimsal »

spitfire wrote: post #275
rosser wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first started doing serious DB work (back in the PostgreSQL 7.x/MySQL 3.x days), there were some show-stopper flaws in MySQL that made it a non-starter for my scenario. (In particular, you couldn't self-join a table, and "February 31" was treated as a valid date.) In performance terms, granted, pg was a bit of a dog in those days, but it outperformed MySQL in every benchmark I could throw at it, with minimal t…

I'll second this. For the longest time mysql was the quickest way on the web to lose your data. As in corrupt databases. It also didn't support transactions where postgres did. Essentially mysql was a dumb datastore with sql interface, whereas postgres was a database. That's changed now, but postgres is still a head in reliability(shit just doesn't break) and feature-set. and I hear in speed these days. But I no long…

Except if you want to do a nice pagination interface over a set of data. select count() in postgresql takes forever on large tables. select count() over myisam is speedy. select count(*) over innodb is speedy but an estimate (I'd still prefer an fast estimate over exceedingly slow accuracy for many scenarios, such as paginated web interfaces).

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#333

Post by pornel »

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.

• EXPLAIN output is awesome (once you understand the format, you'll know exact algorithm postgres uses for the query with bottlenecks highlighted)

• Subqueries are optimised as well as JOINs. I can go all-Inception in my queries and they perform well (I find subquery style often easier to understand than equivalent JOIN).

• You can do UPDATE … SELECT on the same table.

• Postgres has query rewrite (RULE) that can be used to implement writeable VIEWs (which is awesome for migrating legacy applications to new schema)

The only thing I really miss from MySQL is ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE. Postgres has only weak 1-row hacks emulating this, and "standard" MERGE syntax for this is horribly ugly.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#334

Post by [deleted] »

mgkimsal wrote: post #332
spitfire wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second this. For the longest time mysql was the quickest way on the web to lose your data. As in corrupt databases. It also didn't support transactions where postgres did. Essentially mysql was a dumb datastore with sql interface, whereas postgres was a database. That's changed now, but postgres is still a head in reliability(shit just doesn't break) and feature-set. and I hear in speed these days. But I no long…

Except if you want to do a nice pagination interface over a set of data. select count( ) in postgresql takes forever on large tables. select count( ) over myisam is speedy. select count(*) over innodb is speedy but an estimate (I'd still prefer an fast estimate over exceedingly slow accuracy for many scenarios, such as paginated web interfaces).

[deleted]

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#335

Post by frankwiles »

mgkimsal wrote: post #332
spitfire wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second this. For the longest time mysql was the quickest way on the web to lose your data. As in corrupt databases. It also didn't support transactions where postgres did. Essentially mysql was a dumb datastore with sql interface, whereas postgres was a database. That's changed now, but postgres is still a head in reliability(shit just doesn't break) and feature-set. and I hear in speed these days. But I no long…

Except if you want to do a nice pagination interface over a set of data. select count( ) in postgresql takes forever on large tables. select count( ) over myisam is speedy. select count(*) over innodb is speedy but an estimate (I'd still prefer an fast estimate over exceedingly slow accuracy for many scenarios, such as paginated web interfaces).

This is easily solved by using the statistics count rather than a count() and living with the fact your last page of data might have one or two rows +/- the actual count. Then it's fast.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#338

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#339

Post by frankwiles »

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've consulted for many a serious finance company using PG, sure Oracle et al are the main ones, but I've never run across MySQL in those kinds of shops doing anything significant. Granted, I'm a PG consultant.
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