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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

> Yes Postgres can be slower out of the box

Is it though? I read this post earlier this year and it mirrors some similar tests I did back in 2020 when I was just checking basic perf between PostgreSQL / SQL Server / MySQL on my laptop.

https://itnext.io/benchmark-databases-in-docker-mysql-postgr...

> A simple conclusion: Postgres engine family is about twice as fast as MySQL engine family, except MariaDB.

Also:

> Postgres has worse connection handling

Is this addressed in PG14? Or is it still to come in PG15? I haven't kept up with the latest Postgres stuff but I thought they were fixing the connection stuff.

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> I haven't kept up with the latest Postgres stuff but I thought they were fixing the connection stuff.

pg14 improves the performance for large numbers (thousands) of connections. IIRC there is some work to add a primitive connection pooler as an option, but I can't find anything references on that ATM.

So the situation is improving, but the fundamental connection=process model is so baked into Postgres that it's unlikely to ever change.

Naive question (I only use PostgreSQL and SQLite): is there any point using MySQL over MariaDB nowadays?

MySQL 8 has a lot of functionality that MariaDB lacks.

People like to criticize MySQL for some bad engineering decisions made decades ago. For whatever reason, often these folks have a more positive view of MariaDB, but without stopping to consider where all those original MySQL engineers went. FWIW one of the footnotes in the original article touches on this too.

Pretty much only three reasons: you want Enterprise support, you don't want to think about license terms, and you really want to help pay for Larry Ellison's personal island.

Last I checked mariaDB still misses some functiinality around JSON, and i don't know what the story is exactly about compat. With the newer X protocol and its collections.

> Is this addressed in PG14? Or is it still to come in PG15? I haven't kept up with the latest Postgres stuff but I thought they were fixing the connection stuff.

This is by design, postgresql doesn't come with a connection pooler. For each connection a separate process is started. If you have a lot of mostly idle connections then you should use use pooler in your application, server side (e.g. pgbouncer) or both (there are trade offs).

These are not typical workloads for databases, and I don't think very useful

Pretty surprised about the substantial difference between MariaDB and MySQL.

Maria has some additional, interesting settings around replication I saw this week.

Optimistic mode for parallel in-order replication

https://mariadb.com/kb/en/parallel-replication/#optimistic-m...

Heh.

I was at the Perl conference in maybe 1999 or 2000 where there was some guy giving a MySQL talk. It wasn't Monty, but he was in the audience. I asked a question during question time about enabling ssl for encrypted replication, and the guy giving the talk said "Sorry, I don't know if/when that'll happen". Monty stood up and said "I've just done that. I'll check it in tonight, come grab me out in the corridor if you'd like me to mail you the patch."

I then spent the next 7-8 years running replicated MySQL databases in SF/Dallas/London/Singapore/Sydney. It worked really well for us.

All this is showing is that the default settings for MariaDB Docker image are a better fit for this person's particular machine specs than the default settings for the MySQL Docker image. IMO it's not really a useful comparison at all, for any real-world use-case whatsoever.

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