Have you heard of Drizzle? It was announced at OSCON yesterday and is all over the blogosphere. From the Drizzle FAQ:

* So what are the differences between is and MySQL?

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types. Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

Also from the FAQ is that, right now at least, there is no intention to make this run natively on windows and they make the point:

* "This is not a SQL compliant relational..."

Very true, and we do not aim to be that.

It is a fork of MySQL that takes it backward to pre-5.0 in features but hopefully greatly reduces the bugs and instabilities. I plan to look at it but I don't see …

I was browsing the web on this lazy Sunday afternoon and ran across a good article on the Rarest Words blog. The author was trying to get Django installed and running with Postgres. From the author's own admissions, he is not a Postgres fanatic.

Well, this and last year I hear everywhere that PostgreSQL is the way to go and that usage of mySQL in 2008 makes people puke… But without any real arguments (besides "Postgres is the way to go").

After some not so compatible errors with these not so compatible databases, the author did get it working and ran some benchmarks. Postgres did not turn out faster than MySQL. If you ask anyone in the Postgres community which database is faster, they will say Postgres. Ask anyone in the MySQL community and there's no telling what …

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Do you know which open source feature is the most important? Do you know which open source database rocks and which one sucks? Is MySQL better than Postgres? Is Ingres worth considering? How does Firebird compare? Have you used, or have you considered using, an open source database?

Take a survey. It's only 15 questions so it takes just a few minutes.

I'll post a link where you can get the results once they have been compiled and prepared.

BTW, this isn't my survey. I'm just passing on the link.

LewisC

Recently I ran into major problems using GNU diff. It would crash with "diff: memory exhausted" after only a few minutes trying to process the differences between a couple 4.5GB files. Even a beefy box with 9GB of RAM would run out of it in minutes.

There is a different solution, however, that is not dependent on file sizes. Enter rdiff – rsync's backbone. You can read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync (search for rdiff).

The upsides of rdiff are:

• with the same 4.5GB files, rdiff only ate about 66MB of RAM and scaled very well. It never crashed to date.
• it is also MUCH faster than diff.
• rdiff itself combines both diff and patch capabilities, so you can create deltas and apply them using the same program

The downsides of rdiff are:

…

There is a new wiki comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL. Because it's a wiki, hopefully it can be kept updated so that it's current AND accurate.

The wiki is MySQL vs PostgreSQL.

Personally, I'd like to see this grow into a universal comparison site that the community could keep updated.

LewisC