13
Jul 07

Postgres performance

For a long time now, most who’ve used both have felt that Postgres was a better database than MySQL, myself included. But until now, the stick that MySQL keep beating Postgres over the head with was performance. MySQL might be a toy database (okay, it’s moving away from that these days, but only in the last few versions and that’s not really enough dev time to be stable enough for critical stuff), but it was fast on cheap hardware, and for pragmatic web development, that meant it beat out Postgres every day of the week.

Not any more

Basicly, for the first time in a seriouly major benchmark, postgres not only outperformed mysql, but it nearly matched oracle (which was running on hardware that cost more than twice as much).

There’s also this earlier post, which basicly showed that Mysql on a single-CPU machine starts off faster than Postgres, but falls off as the number of concurrent users
rises, until it’s way behind postgres, which remains pretty invariant as the number of users rises. It also shows that postgres takes advantage of multiple CPUs better than MySQL does (up to 16 CPUs anyway, where the postgres team say they still have work to do).

Something to think about. Do you expect to ever have more than one or two users on your site? Better start with postgres so, and save yourself the cost and hassle of a later switch (I don’t care how good your database abstraction layer is, no DAL is so good that you don’t have to change your app when you switch database. Maybe more on that later.)


13
Jul 07

PHP4 End of Life

Got to hand it to the internals people, when an idea’s a good one, they run with it. First the announcement that namespaces are now officially a part of the development trunk for PHP, then this:

PHP 4 end of life announcement
[13-Jul-2007]

Today it is exactly three years ago since PHP 5 has been released. In those three years it has seen many improvements over PHP 4. PHP 5 is fast, stable & production-ready and as PHP 6 is on the way, PHP 4 will be discontinued.

The PHP development team hereby announces that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. We will continue to make critical security fixes available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. Please use the rest of this year to make your application suitable to run on PHP 5.

For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, we would like to point you to our migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well.

So we will finally see adoption rates for PHP5 climb a bit. You have to wonder – will the lessons learnt here prevent the PHP4-5 problems during the PHP5-6 cycle?