Should we take on the elephant (PostgreSQL)?

We’ve never really considered supporting PostgreSQL (will be referred to as PGSQL for the remainder of this post) until recently when someone had a inquiry about why we don’t offer it. Unfortunately the only good answer we had was we haven’t seen a demand for it.

So that brings us to the point of this post: should we offer PGSQL

After looking around to try to find some of the key differences in MySQL and PGSQL and to help us decide whether we should support it or not I came across a interesting comparison sheet:

Mysql 4/5 vs. PostgreSQL Comparison Sheet

• One thing that bothered me with this comparison sheet is the lack of explanation for the “performance” section which just has “slower” and “faster” without any information how they came to this conclusion (though PGSQL has the reputation for being the “big slow elephant” there has been numerous user benchmarks which rival MySQL - though only one peer reviewed benchmark I’m aware of which shows that the performance is right on par with other RDBMS)

Granted that is just barely touching the differences between the two databases, it boils down to one thing: Do HawkHost clients (or future clients) want us to start offering PostgreSQL in addition to MySQL?

Some interesting links regarding MySQL & PostgreSQL:

• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/techdocs.83
• http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/res2007q3/jAppServer2004-20070703-00073.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/storage-toast.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL
• http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743/0/page/1

Note:

I personally prefer the Elephant over the Dolphin - thoughts? Leave a comment on whether you think we should start supports PostgreSQL or e-mail sales.

Cheers, HawkHost Staff