Hi Thomas, On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 23:17 -0700, Thomas Ashelford wrote: > I keep reading that PostgreSQL is the preferred database for use with > Django, but I'm wondering if anyone can explain what its concrete > advantages are. > > I've just moved from DreamHost to Webfaction to get the advantage of > using mod_python instead of fcgi. Already the advantages of mod_python > are clear (it's basically less flaky). But I now have the choice of 2 > dB platforms and I'm wondering if there are any strong reasons to > switch to PostgreSQL. So far I can only see a potential negative - I > may want to use fulltext indexing in the future, and I believe this is > not available on PostgreSQL.
(I'm not going to repeat what others have already mentioned in this thread; I agree with all of them. My two cents, though...) I would add, for most projects, it's not a really clear cut case. Django hides the SQL oddities for you, so there's not going to much difference there (using MySQL 5 with transaction support is kind of assumed here, although even that's not clear cut in some cases). Ian's comment about familiarity is very valid: for most things, they are equivalent, so whichever you feel more comfortable with is important. In a crisis, having to worry about *how* to do something, as opposed to *what* to do is not an extra burden one usually needs. I've had days where I have had to switch between Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL within a few hours of each other and it can become a bit head-spinning. Consistency between the various sites you do is not a crazy goal. By and large, unless you are going to have tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) or rows in a lot of tables and be doing lots of multi-table joins, I don't think you're going to see a lot of difference. At the upper levels, I think PostgreSQL does a bit better in memory management (this didn't use to be universally the case, by the way) and it performs better with large numbers of simultaneous connections doing frequent reads (100's of connections at once) -- although I haven't verified this last claim for a year or so, so MySQL may have gotten better. Beyond that, unless you are doing lots of low-level SQL, there's not a lot to choose between them for many circumstances. If you are doing very high data volume stuff, it's going to be a matter of testing typical uses anyway, since no two setups are exactly the same. The problem is that this is a "vi vs. emacs" / "python vs. ruby" / "MS Windows vs. Commodore 64" sort of debate. The two choices are basically equivalent and for the bulk of uses each is sufficiently capable. I would say "pick on" and if your experience over time suggests that the database is a problem and tests with the alternative work better, then it's not even *that* painful to move data between the two systems. They both basically talk SQL, after all, and a few sed scripts and the like applied to the right pressure points in a data dump means it's not too hard. So I'm going for the pragmatic "don't sweat it (too much)!" option. Best wishes, Malcolm --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
