The PostgreSQL community is getting really serious about replication. On Thursday May 29th, Tom Lane issued a manifesto concerning database replication on behalf of the PostgreSQL core team to the pgsql-hackers mailing list. Tom's post basically said that lack of easy-to-use, built-in replication is a significant obstacle to wider adoption of PostgreSQL and proposed a technical solution based on log shipping, which is already a well-developed and useful feature.

What was the reaction? The post generated close to 140 responses within the next two days, with a large percentage of the community weighing in. It's one of the most significant announcements on the list in recent history. …

Why? In brief, it is said that mysql is not as stable as postgresql. Postgresql or pgsql focuses on a single database engine as compared to mysql which has a pluggable engine architecture and has multiple engines. Also postgresql is well designed as compared to mysql. psql console is much better than mysql console (you will realize it when you use it). It is supposed to be much more scalable and

Welcome the the 99th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since PGCon recently happened right here in Ottawa, let’s start with some posts about it, and about PostgreSQL. Josh Berkus came to the conference with his Database Soup. It sounds like he enjoyed himself: “So, that’s pgCon. It was exciting and fun. All of you PG geeks who missed it should be kicking yourselves about now, and putting in budget requests for next year.” He has day one highlights; day two highlights, and also …

The 98th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Jeff’s SQL Server Blog.

Log Buffer is a shared project of the DBA blogging community, so you’re welcome to edit and publish an edition yourself. LB’s 100th anniversary edition is still up-for-grabs (and there’s plenty of room besides that), so read the Log Buffer homepage and the guidelines, and then email me.

Here’s Jeff Smith’s …

Bruce Momjian says

…the volume of patches [to PostgreSQL] has risen dramatically during the past few years.

This is total hearsay — I don’t have hard numbers, haven’t verified it myself, etc etc. But consider the source!

What can be responsible for this increase in patches to PostgreSQL?

Bruce Momjian, Open Source development, patches, PostgreSQL

There is much discussion of why MySQL is more widely adopted than PostgreSQL. The discussion I’ve heard is mostly among the PostgreSQL community members, who believe their favorite database server is better in many ways, and are sometimes puzzled why people would choose an inferior product.

There are also many comparison charts that show one server is better than the other in some ways. These don’t really seem to help people with this question, either!

I can’t answer for everyone, but I can put it in the form of a question: if I were to replace MySQL with PostgreSQL, what things do I rely on that would become painful or even force a totally different strategy? The answer turns out to be fairly simple for me: replication and upgrades.

Replication

Love it or hate it, MySQL’s built-in replication is …

It is that time of the year when many PostgreSQL fans gather in Ottawa, Canada for PGCon 2008 next week. This will be my first visit to PGCon in Ottawa. Earlier this year I had presented two sessions "PostgreSQL and Benchmarks" and "Best Practices of PostgreSQL on Solaris" at PostgreSQL Conference 2008 East in Maryland. Thanks to that visit, this time I might recognize many people by face this time around.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor at PGCon 2008. There will be quite a bit of presence from Sun in PGCon. Josh, Max, Robert, Magne, Zdenek, Jim, Mayuresh et all will be present out there.

Josh Berkus is doing a tutorial on  "GUCs: A Three Hour Tour" on …

The 97th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts.

We have Jeff Smith and Ward Pond standing by for two upcoming editions. And if you’d like to contribute, make yourself known in the DBA community-at-large (and have some fun in the process), you too can do Log Buffer! Read the homepage and send me, the Log Buffer coordinator, an email.

And now, Brian …

There have been a number of requests for copies of the slides to the Tungsten Scale-Out Stack talk I gave at the MySQL Conference in April. Here they are courtesy of the nice folks at O'Reilly who organized the conference.

Tungsten is our codename for a set of technologies to raise database performance and availability using scale-out. In the database world scale-out is a term of art that means spreading data across servers on multiple systems. With data in multiple places you are less subject to failures--when one copy crashes you just use the others. Similarly, if your application runs a lot of queries, you can spread them over different machines, which makes for faster and more stable …