SpirirHost Support Centre: MySQL Reference Manual p.61

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Table of Contents
1. General Information
2. MySQL Installation
3. Tutorial Introduction
4. Database Administration
5. MySQL Optimisation
6. MySQL Language Reference
7. MySQL Table Types
8. MySQL APIs
9. Extending MySQL

Chapter 1: General Information 61 1.9.2.3 Benchmarking MySQL and PostgreSQL The only Open Source benchmark that we know of that can be used to benchmark MySQL Server and PostgreSQL (and other databases) is our own. It can be found at http://www.mysql.com/information/benchmarks.html. We have many times asked the PostgreSQL developers and some PostgreSQL users to help us extend this benchmark to make it the denitive benchmark for databases, but unfortunately we haven't gotten any feedback for this. We, the MySQL developers, have, because of this, spent a lot of hours to get maximum performance from PostgreSQL for the benchmarks, but because we don't know PostgreSQL intimately, we are sure that there are things that we have missed. We have on the benchmark page documented exactly how we did run the benchmark so that it should be easy for anyone to repeat and verify our results. The benchmarks are usually run with and without the --fast option. When run with --fast we are trying to use every trick the server can do to get the code to execute as fast as possible. The idea is that the normal run should show how the server would work in a default setup and the --fast run shows how the server would do if the application developer would use extensions in the server to make his application run faster. When running with PostgreSQL and --fast we do a VACUUM after every major table UPDATE and DROP TABLE to make the database in perfect shape for the following SELECTs. The time for VACUUM is measured separately. When running with PostgreSQL 7.1.1 we could, however, not run with --fast because during the INSERT test, the postmaster (the PostgreSQL deamon) died and the database was so corrupted that it was impossible to restart postmaster. After this happened twice, we decided to postpone the --fast test until the next PostgreSQL release. The details about the machine we run the benchmark on can be found on the benchmark page. Before going to the other benchmarks we know of, we would like to give some background on benchmarks. It's very easy to write a test that shows any database to be the best database in the world, by just restricting the test to something the database is very good at and not testing anything that the database is not good at. If one, after doing this, summarises the result as a single gure, things are even easier. This would be like us measuring the speed of MySQL Server compared to PostgreSQL by looking at the summary time of the MySQL benchmarks on our web page. Based on this MySQL Server would be more than 40 times faster than PostgreSQL, something that is, of course, not true. We could make things even worse by just taking the test where PostgreSQL performs worst and claim that MySQL Server is more than 2000 times faster than PostgreSQL. The case is that MySQL does a lot of optimisations that PostgreSQL doesn't do. This is, of course, also true the other way around. An SQL optimiser is a very complex thing, and a company could spend years just making the optimiser faster and faster. When looking at the benchmark results you should look for things that you do in your application and just use these results to decide which database would be best suited for your application. The benchmark results also show things a particular database is not good

MySQL Reference Manual

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