Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I'm very confused by this comment. Did you switch mysql and pgsql in this comment, or was this what you meant as written?

MySQL has always struck me as having a non-standard and quite strange type system (broken time/date types without microsecond accuracy, explicitly sized text types, ...). I've always seen PostgreSQL being marketed as a drop in replacement for Oracle due to superior standards support. If anything, PostgreSQL seems much more similar to Oracle than MySQL.

I'm also very curious what sorts of things I should avoid if you really do have a very long list of queries that PostgreSQL handles really poorly.




you can write

select sum(x=1) from y;

in standard SQL, Oracle, and Mysql. True == 1 in standard SQL, False == 0. Both pgsql and Microsoft SQL server define a nonstandard boolean type that requires you to add a cast or an if statement, bulking up the query.

I did a shootout of mongodb and the three RDBMS systems (!Oracle) I mention for building a system to represent data from Freebase. It was possible to make a VARCHAR(4096) in mysql and only index the first 64 characters which meant I could map freebase types to mysql tables without running into index limitations -- I wanted the better GIS capabilities in pgsql, but I didn't want to double the size of my tables and queries to be able to handle strings losslessly.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: