[Server-devel] XS SW

[Tim Moody]

Hi Martin,

Thanks for answering my question.  Like you I only have anecdotal evidence, 
and producing a thorough comparison is beyond what I could achieve with a 
reasonable amount of effort.

I guess I'll continue to struggle get moodle to work with Pg on XS(163).  I 
didn't find Pg as an installed service and the moodle that yum installed 
only had mysql support libraries as dependencies.  Or should I just wait 
until moodle is bundled with XS?

Tim


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff at gmail.com>
To: "Tim Moody" <timmoody at sympatico.ca>
Cc: <server-devel at lists.laptop.org>
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 6:04 PM
Subject: Re: [Server-devel] XS SW


> Hi Tim,
>
> in brief - we cannot use such simplistic criteria. In absolute
> numbers, Windows 200x Server may outnumber Linux installations out
> there. We have much more serious factors to consider :-)
>
> If you can produce (and document) a thorough MySQL vs Pg comparison --
> with numbers and scripts so I can run the same comparison -- and it
> shows MySQL to be better, then I am happy to reconsider. The areas
> that I am mainly interested in are:
>
> - absolute reliability - the XS will most of the time "lose power"
> rather than be shut down
> - performance in low mem configurations
> - performance overall
>
> IME - working extensively with MySQL since '98 and with Pg since 2003
> - is that Pg has _never_ seen a lockup or failed to start after a bad
> shutdown / powerloss / disk corruption on me; and recent versions of
> Pg mostly match performance of ISAM/MyISAM with small datasets and
> simple SQL. Medium to large datasets, and complex SQL (which Moodle
> uses extensively) make Pg shine.
>
> This is to say - MySQL with MyISAM/ISAM tables is unacceptably
> unrelaible. InnoDB may make MySQL more reliable, but it is
> significantly slower are much larger on disk (or was when Moodle.org
> attempted the switch and had to back out). Unfortunately, InnoDB is a
> bit of a dead end because of Oracle, and Falcon won't be ready for a
> while. It is a shaky track.
>
> One argument for MySQL I have heard before in other projects is "wider
> webapp support" - but to be frank I found that Pg support is a good
> measure of quality. There is a ton of crap webapps out there, weekend
> projects that are good enough for their developers, but not really
> good for any serious use. The few good ones out there are portable
> across DBs and OSs, have decent approach to security, have put
> significant work into scalable code and APIs, etc ;-)
>
> Does that help? If you really think MySQL passes muster - please give
> us some concrete material.
>
> cheers,
>
>
> martin
> -- 
> martin.langhoff at gmail.com
> martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
> - ask interesting questions
> - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first
> - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff