On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 7:24 AM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > * MySQL's development has suffered under Sun, and become virtually > moribund under Oracle. They operate as a closed shop, occasionally > tossing GPL-licensed releases over the wall, with very little input > accepted from the community.
I don't know whether it's a legit concern or pure FUD, but it's been suggested that since the MySQL license is GPL and not LGPL, any code that links against it is forced to be GPL too. I'm not sure how far that goes (eg if you're using it from Python, at what point does it stop being "code linked to GPL code" and start being a discrete system), and IANAL, but I prefer to work with systems with more freedom in their licensing. PostgreSQL is under a BSD-like license, so it can be used without issues. Also, and a completely irrelevant point but maybe of curiosity: It's perfectly possible to use PostgreSQL without linking against libpq (by reimplementing the wire protocol - Pike's pgsql module does that), but I've never heard of anyone doing that with MySQL. Perhaps if someone cared, they could release a non-GPL equivalent to libmysql and that would solve this problem. Not gonna be me, though, I'm quite happy with PG 9.1. MySQL works very nicely with PHP. They each have certain sloppinesses that work well together to make it easy for an idiot to create a dynamic web site. PostgreSQL works equally nicely with stricter languages, where if you make a mistake, you get an error. MySQL gives your script a place to store data; PostgreSQL lets you set up a database and have application(s) manipulate it. The assumption in MySQL is that the script is always right; the assumption in PostgreSQL is that the database is always right. It's a philosophical distinction, and you just have to take your choice. For me, that's an easy choice, partly since I grew up with IBM DB2 on OS/2, with extremely strict rules (and, by the way, nothing *like* the performance of a modern database - old 200MB IDE hard drives didn't give quite the same TPS as a modern SATA). ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
