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