ONwe is about as easy to use as the other
sk3pt1c said:
is mySQL easier to use than postgreSQL?
and if so,if i make a database using mySQL, could i dump it and restore it in postgreSQL?
would it work?
I've used both mySQL and PostgreSQL and yes you can move data between the two by dumpping and restoring through a common text file format.
As for wich is easier to use they are about the same except that PostgreSQL has _much_ more funtionality but if you ignore the features you don't need (such as user installable extentions to the SQL language) there is no difference. At the basic user level SQL is SQL.
How to choose between them? If the application is small in both the number of concurrent users and complexity then MySQL will offer better performance but if the number of concurrent users is over about 6 or 10 or you have many related tables then PostgreSQL is better. It used to be that MySQL did not even offer "atomic" transactions but there is a way to adress that now.
The amount of data you store matters little. a million or so rows is triveal for either. When you get into tens of billions of records PostgreSQL has an advantage. And yes 1E13 rows is not unrealistic, we used A DBMS to record snapshots of a large computer simulation.
I'm using PostgreSQL right now for an apllaction involving telemetry from spacelift bosters and on my dual xeon system, perfomance is outstanding. I'm using SCSI disks and 4GB RAM. The amount of RAM is the biggest factor in DBMS performance. I'm seeing 1000 querries per second in some cases with PostgreSQL.
Oh yes, if you DO decide to benchmark the two, I found the hard way that you need to use a realistic amount of data in your test tables as small tables can cache entirely in RAM but slightly larger ones can't. Can make a 10X different in results. The first step in testing is to fill the tables with a realistic amount of random data.
