kulawik at 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.

-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B