[Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Mark Woodward <markw at mohawksoft.com> wrote:
> Well, with MySQL, "create
> index" and "drop index" LOCK the tables as they are operating. LOCK THE
> TABLES. Think about that. In PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any "real"
> database, "create index" and "drop index" only impact performance in as
> much as any other transaction.

True of older versions, less true of 5.5.  NDBCLUSTER storage engine works
around this by propagating the update to cluster members one at a time, taking
each offline.  InnoDB does a table copy.

You're right that MySQL's rivals had a better design for this operation;
future versions of MySQL could replace this logic.  But as far as it being a
showstopper for production, that depends.

In my case, I'll be having to deal with large table sizes, but there will
rarely be changes to indices and the nature of the business permits taking the
DB offline for maintenance (unlike a public site).  So this is only one of
many criteria for choosing a system.  (Note also that even with a public site
like at my last employer, we had some solid workarounds using read-only slaves
which enabled us to update indices easily enough without major production
impact.)

This kind of technical comparison is exactly what I'm looking for.  If I had a
list of the top-10 things that PostgreSQL does better than MySQL then I'd
probably have a case.  One or two won't be enough.

-rich