[Wikipedia-l] LAG

[Jonathan Walther]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 06:38:41PM -0500, The Cunctator wrote:
>I must say, my suspicion is that it's less a problem of MySQL than it is
>of Wikipedia's implementation.
>
>(I'm saying this as someone who's done a lot of MySQL/Access/Oracle
>work, but not any Postgres work.)
>
>I'm always suspicious when someone makes the assertion that Language or
>Database X is vastly inferior to Language or Database Y, especially when
>all of the languages and databases have been around for a lot longer
>than the code that uses it. 
>
>There have been some efforts to optimize the database, but not many. And
>LDC's code is certainly better than the original mess, but it's hardly
>gotten the million-eyeball treatment.
>
>That said, I know we've got limited resources, so if you're a Postgres
>expert and switching to Postgres is what will motivate you to do a code
>revamp, then tally ho! (Which is why I'm just writing this to you,
>because in the end I'm not saying anything important.)

I'm not saying Postgres would result in dramatic speedups; it's about
equal to MySQL in speed. But I believe the slowdown caused by locks
WOULD go away.  I agree with you that better indexing could speed things
up, as could better code design.  I have been looking at the PHP, and
this is a big job.  I need to finish implementing cookies in my C cgi
library, then I can consider doing it.

I've been prejudiced against MySQL since the day I bought the "Practical
SQL Handbook", sat down to type in the examples, and none of them worked
on MySQL, and they all worked on Postgres.

The current PHP code mixes SQL in with regular code, (ugh!) and doesn't
have separate HTML templates either; the HTML is also intermingled with
the code.  (double ugh!)

If the codebase could be cleaned up, the database optimizations would be
much easier to do, and we might not even need to switch from MySQL.

Thanks for your mail; I'm a slow worker but I tend to get there in the
end.  And you are right, switching to Postgres would be a big motivator
:)

Jonathan

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