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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I know a lot of this will be up to the architecture and specific nature of each app... but has anyone recently compared a modern MySQL and Postgresql installation on a few baseline metrics? I'd love to see the differences. I am starting to use it more and more, being a Django developer surrounded by Postgres users. But, so far the core differences are scaring me away. psql template1? It doesn't make as much sense to me.

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Why connect to template1? It should be invisible. Create a user and a database for your webapp. Matching the unix account name is the simplest way to do that.

In pg_hba.conf, let unix users authenticate as matching PostgreSQL users:

    local all all peer

The postgres user on Debian/Ubuntu can create users and databases:

    sudo -u postgres createuser -SRD webappuser
    sudo -u postgres createdb webappuser --owner=webappuser

    sudo -u webappuser psql

> psql template1? It doesn't make as much sense to me.

What doesn't make sense about it? It opens a postgres shell to the `template1` database, that's all...

And there should be very little reason to connect to `template1`: it is the default template for creating a database (it's copied to the new db file basically), so the only point in connecting to it is e.g. creating a few common tables or enabling extensions so that all the databases you create have them by default.

I've yet to ever need that.

What's the equivalent of template1 in mysql?

I don't think there is one, mysql only creates empty databases it does not have a concept of db templates.

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