On Tuesday 08 May 2001 15:34, Cees de Groot wrote:
> Ned Konz <ned at bike-nomad.com> said:
> >> What I've read portrays PostgreSQL as immature and bug ridden (NOT
> >> stable) vs MySQL as stable but lacking in transaction management.
> >> Comments?
> >
> >MySQL has transactions now, if that's important to you.
>
> "transactions". At least, last time I read what they understood under
> transactions I definitely turned away from mySQL. I don't recall it
> exactly, but I think it didn't pass the ACID checklist. 

There is a discussion of their support at:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/C/O/COMMIT.html

And you can compare the crash-me results for MySQL 3.23.25 and PostgreSQL 7.0 
at:
http://www.mysql.com/information/crash-me.php?mysql=on&postgres=on
though note that since this uses the default table setup, transactions aren't 
supported (you have to tell MySQL that you want transactions when you create 
a table).

Personally, I wouldn't know which one to choose. I've managed to work as a 
programmer for the last 15 years or so (actually, my first programmer job was 
25 years ago) without having to deal with databases very much, except for a 
particularly unpleasant 3 months where I did (more or less) mail list 
maintenance using Informix.

Doing embedded systems and commercial applications (like tape backup), one 
generally regards databases as either totally unnecessary or (at best) a 
necessary evil.

And doing object stuff, I've come to regard relational databases as pretty 
bad mechanisms for object persistence.

I can appreciate that some people feel that data is important, though. I've 
just never wanted to feel that way.

I _am_ working on a project that will use one or the other for _very simple_ 
field data collection in an embedded system: very few (if any) joins (there 
may be some for config data but that's about all), low performance. I suspect 
either would work fine. I'm most interested in battery consumption, actually. 
Any suggestions? I'll be using Perl.

-- 
Ned Konz
currently: Stanwood, WA
email:     ned at bike-nomad.com
homepage:  http://bike-nomad.com