Seriously, WTF?

[Steve Sims]

On 8/5/08 12:30, "Paul Makepeace" <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:

> Not that a good yarn isn't appreciated, but... Saying "MySQL 3.1
> couldn't handle my incredibly complex queries" is rather like saying
> "I switched from MS-DOS to Unix as the command line tool weren't up to
> what I needed" -- a historic anecdote, and a somewhat self-evident one
> at that. It doesn't really add anything to a modern "Which RDBMS?"
> discussion. (Maybe you didn't intend it to; just sayin').

:) point taken.

A colleague of mine looked up the london.pm emails from the time I was going
through this pain, and we just chatted about this a little more...  I did
most of my work on this transition back in December 2005...

> MySQL 5.1 is great product and I'm quite certain these days you
> wouldn't run into the problems you've talked about.

I *did* test out with MySQL 5 (which I believe was still beta), and this was
executing the queries in question in 6s, but suffered from exactly the same
scaling issues.  So if I deployed it I would still have had the same
problems.  I needed a solution there and then...

Inevitably my tale will remain anecdotal - for it to be anything but I'd
have to run a heap of benchmarks on both MySQL 5.1 and PostgreSQL 8.3 with
all the old data.  I'm incredibly unlikely to find the time to do that.
Given my experiences, I have my doubts that 5.1 will be much better than 5.0
anyway for the use case I was putting it to.

For me MySQL is very much a case of once-bitten, twice shy, as I'm sure it
is for many other people around here.

> An interesting story would be hearing how your company handles
> redundancy, backups, and disaster recovery drills, with Pg.

Unfortunately KarmaDownload didn't last beyond June 2006.  It was always
*severely* resource constrained, so didn't have the resources for any real
redundancy.  "pg_dump" was the backup tool...

Steve