kulawik@sim.spk-berlin.de said:
the mySQL-authors have - of course - heard of transactions: read the friendly mysql-manual at
They've heard of it and chose to ignore it for the implementation of their database. I probably should have used these words right away, because if they simply wouldn't have heard about transactions, one could still be a bit lenient on them.
I'm not going to turn this discussion into a this-database-is-better-than-yours flamewar, but I do know a bit on the topic and they have made a very bad decision and they are proven wrong by the fact that Postgres outperforms them especially when scaling up (MVCC is far better than table locking).
At best one could say that MySQL is to Postgres as assembly language to Smalltalk: probably faster if you know exactly what you are doing, but maintenance sucks (because of all the necessary manual coding with table locking and so on) and most people screw up and end up with slow spaghetti.