Re: Technical refresh->Why MySQL?

On Saturday, August 11, 2001, at 03:27 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:

This love affair with a fundamentally simplistic db engine has always mystified me.

Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?

Something like that. I've been doing a lot of rewrites from MySQL to PostgreSQL, working waaay too many hours. It's all billable, which is good, but the stress has apparently taken something a toll. (I woke up this morning, re-read the email I wrote, and regretted the tone and vague ranting.....). I think I need a vacation. :-)

PHP's PostgreSQL support is every bit as good as its support for MySQL. You will also find a number of PHP developers, including myself, on the GreatBridge technical advisory board, and we talk to the core PostgreSQL folks like Bruce Momjian and Tome Lane all the time. Perhaps if you could identify exactly how else we can do more we can try to address whatever it is you have a problem with.

A few things stand out as possible differences: 1. The default install comes with MySQL support already built in, by default. Microsoft is undergoing several anti-trust lawsuits for a similar reason, because I think it's been been demonstrated that the default install is what folks will tend to use. Why not PostgreSQL support as well? (Of course, if every extension with active proponents had working libraries available in the default PHP install... Wow, that _would_ be pretty cool. A much bigger download, but a massive leap forward in terms of resolving basic installation and configuration issues. I'd rather spend 20 more minutes on ftp than spend 2 hours building other libraries....Of course, it requires much tighter communication to handle licensing issues, and prior problems with this may have lead to some "burn out" on this idea.). 2. Bug fixes for basic things such as connection handling have "seemed" to take much longer, perhaps that's merely perceptual on my part, or a lack of contributors, or the maintainers are swamped. (There was actually a big bug with *_pconnects, because PostgreSQL runs into a shared memory wall, and stops accepting connections.... but it looks like it was possibly fixed in CVS, even though there's still bug listings for it). OTOH, there's a lot _less_ outstanding bugs, so like I said, it may be perceptual, or related to bugs that are more important in the code I maintain, but less important to others. 3. It wasn't until June 19th, (thanks again, Georg von Zezschwitz! You rock!) that much of the pgsql extension had the same ease of use as the MySQL extensions. PostgreSQL required additional coding for, well, almost everything involving a row. This had been in place as long as I've used PostgreSQL+PHP, and it probably just an artifact of different coding styles. This had an effect where even basic PHP+PostgreSQL examples looked "harder", and took longer to write (additional loop calls, counters, etc.). (Oops.. this still isn't documented, either...). Since it takes a bit for such things to trickle down through publications, examples, docs, and tutorials, PHP+PostgreSQL will look like it's "harder" to use than PHP+MySQL for quite a while. I guess this is sort of fixed now, and will get better as time goes by, and documentation gets changed or cleaned up. -Ronabop --2D426F70|759328624|00101101010000100110111101110000 ron@opus1.com, 520-326-6109, http://www.opus1.com/ron/ The opinions expressed in this email are not necessarily those of myself, my employers, or any of the other little voices in my head.