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epochwolf
Asked: 2009-05-01 19:57:14 +0800 CST

Which database server scales better: PostgreSQL or MySQL?

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I'm working on a website that could eventually have a very large database. The website will be an art community not until deviantART. I'll be running a lot of queries for analyzing how the site is used. I expect some of the queries to kill the database because I don't know how to optimize SQL queries (yet). I'm starting out with a small linux VPS and would move to physical servers in the future.

Which database would scale the best given this situation?

linux mysql postgresql scaling

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Before you make a decision based on scalability, you might want to read through these two pages and decide how much you value your sanity:

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  3. First let me prefix my answer with the fact that I am heavily biased towards PostgreSQL. I use both PostgreSQL and MySQL very heavily on fairly large site. I, from time to time, have problems with MySQL falling over performance wise. When this happens, I usually restart it and things go back to normal. It's also worth noting that we run PostgreSQL on everything from 8 to 32 core boxes and our MySQL cluster runs on a set of 8 core boxes. Monty, when he was at Sun, stated that MySQL does not scale on a single box beyond 4 cores.

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  4. Really it depends on what kind of queries you will be running. Unless you are running very complex queries either will be fine for a very large web site. There are good examples of both databases running very large scale web sites

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