I was recently asked, 'Why do you think MySQL is better than Postgres?' To be honest, I think both PostGres and MySQL are great. However, they each have their pros and cons. I don't know everything either, so sincerely welcome any of your comments, suggestions, and stories in regards to comparing MySQL and PostGres.

A side by side comparison table, is offered from the MySQL website, here.

We must consider our own goals, requirements, capabilities, and priorities when deciding which technology solution to 'side with'. Personally, I side with a wide variety of technology solutions, depending on each individual project that I am involved with.

I enjoy working with both open-source and commercial technology solutions. Of course, the workaholic geek in me, also enjoys developing custom technology solutions completely from scratch too!

This page will detail my findings and thoughts, when comparing PostGres to MySQL. I believe every negative aspect, presents great opportunities for innovative people to shine, seize the opportunity, and to produce a wonderful solution.

At the end of the day, when I have to decide between MySQL and PostGres, I will choose the one that fits the current project and client's requirements, capabilities, and goals the best. Does the customer have the required time, resources, hardware, staff, and budget to develop, upgrade, support, maintain, backup, or migrate the chosen database solutions?

The following are links to my comparisons and research findings.

 Pricing ~ Age ~ Support ~ Reliability ~ Extensible ~ Cross-Platform ~ High Volume Environments ~ GUI ~ Technical Features ~ Resources

OPEN-SOURCE : MySQL and PostGres both offer Open-Source and Commercial Licenses.

MySQL offers commercial database and support. Pricing averages about $1500.00 per year.

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MySQL AB was founded by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael "Monty" Widenius. MySQL AB is the sole owner of the MySQL server source code. The company is privately held, without debt, and it is financed by venture capital since July 2001.

PostGres is 15 years in development.

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MySQL and PostGres both have a large community of professionals and enthusiasts in various online and offline communities.

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MySQL and PostGres both have a history of reliability and stability.

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MySQL and PostGres both offer their source code at no charge. You can customize or extend them both in any way you wish, with no attached costs. Both MySQL and PostGres have large communities of professionals and enthusiasts that actively extend the features and plug-ins.

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PostGres is available for almost every brand of Unix and Windows.

MySQL is available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Netware, and other Unix-like Systems.

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MySQL and PostGres both claim to be stable for high volume environments. PostGres uses MVCC.

MySQL; I have seen problems in the past, with MySQL being used in high volume environments. I beleive that if more time was allocated to research and fine-tune the MySQL settings, that those problems could have been avoided in the first place. The maximum number of columns is 3398. The maximum size of a query is 1 M. On 32-bit machines the maximum file size is 16 TB, depending on the kernel version used.

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MySQL and PostGres both offer several high quality GUI tools to administer the database and to design the database.

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