database in python ?

[Terry Hancock]

On Tuesday 12 April 2005 04:54 pm, Pierre-Frédéric Caillaud wrote:
> 	Speaking of the manual, the mysql manual is quite... well... i don't  
> quite find the word, but it has many sentences which sound like PR stuff.  
> Like, we don't do this like you or anyone would expect, but there is a  
> reason ! Embrace our school of thought, stop worrying about integrity  !  
> Peace, my friend, etc. And the non-working examples posted in the user  
> comments are nice to look at, too. The organization of the manual is a  
> mess, too, it's often quite difficult to find what I seek. The postgres  
> manual is just wonderful.

Whereas the Postgresql manual starts with an explanation of how the
universe was formed and goes on to a diatribe against anyone who
ever works on a competing RDBMS because it "wastes effort".
Arrogance like that is stunning, and it destroys my confidence in the
project itself if the people responsible for it think like that.

I put it down at that point, myself. ;-)

It would be nice to think that that has been since removed, but I
haven't bothered to check. 

Actually, I'm exaggerating, but I certainly found the MySQL online
manual vastly easier to read than the Postgresql documentation.  That
may not be a totally fair comparison, since I'm comparing the MySQL
manual *now* to the Postgresql manual *then*.   But then you all
keep describing MySQL's 1990s feature set, including the licensing.

> 	I know I'm feeding the flamewar, but I can't resist, 

Yeah, well, as long as we don't take ourselves too seriously. ;-)

> once I came up on a  
> post on the mysql website from a guy basically saying "wow, the fulltext  
> is so powerful, I can search this document set in only half a second !"  
> and then the same day, on the postgres mailinglist, there was a message  
>  from a guy who was really upset because his full text search on something  
> like 1000 times bigger would take more than one tenth a second, and that  
> wan't really acceptable for him, and then several competent people  
> responded and helped him make it work.

That's interesting.  Most sources I've read seemed to suggest that postgresql
is slower than MySQL, at least for modest size tables.  There must, I suppose,
be some turnover point on the size of the database?  Or are you arguing that
postgresql is now faster than MySQL in the general case?  Can you suggest
sources for investigating that formally?

It's just possible that I should reconsider Postgresql compatibility. I
would assume that using the Python DB API would make portability
between the two easier in any case, wouldn't it?

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com