Progress on scaling of FreeBSD on 8 CPU systems

[Paul Pathiakis]

>
> What makes PostgreSQL more interesting? Because you use it perhaps?
> I would hesitate a guess that Mysql is a very common workload
> under FreeBSD likely more so than PostgreSQL and as such that
> would be a very good reason for it to have particular interest
> and hence focus as a good starting point.
>
>     Steve
>

I'm not trying to start a flame war, I'm just trying to give my take 
on "perception" here.

PostgreSQL is developed on FreeBSD and they've always had a close relationship 
by means of FreeBSD being the "platform of choice".  PostgreSQL is considered 
a "real" database.

When you look at commercial databases, there tend to be two large market 
shares:  Oracle and DB2.  Oracle has moved into the realm of clustered access 
database with multiple path writing into the DB and it can scale to be quite 
large.

PostgreSQL has a large installed base.  SUN Microsystems is now supporting it.  
It's free.  It has advanced features like clustering.  It scales to be quite 
large.

MySQL has been the "white elephant in the middle of the room" for a while and 
then it became the thing for the Linux community to point at to "prove" 
inferiority.

MySQL is on the order of the small to medium db.  Easy to configure, easy to 
tune.  Similar to MS SQL, it's widely used and scales to a certain level (so 
far, however, this new benchmarking may show it's not MySQL that's the 
issue.)

Please don't jump on this mail, it's just a "perception" letter.  There's no 
facts in it and I freely admit that.  It's a "touchy/feely" thing in the OSS 
community.  

I've helped a few companies replace heavy read Oracle DBs with PostgreSQL.  
They love not paying money to Larry & Co.

P.