While Mark was looking at MongoDB, I was playing comparing various aspects of MySQL and Postgres performance. Certain PG performance numbers I saw (40kqps vs 110kqps from MySQL) made me really upset, so I ended up discussing with people at #postgresql – and started comparing various versions/configurations/machines/etc.

Apparently 2.6.32 kernel, which is in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) and is also basis for future RHEL6 kernel has nearly 20% performance degradation for PG (though not for MySQL, phew) – and apparently it was news to their community (I have started an email thread, will see where it goes).

Warning: there’re quotes that has been deliberately taken out of context for more snark

While I was doing my research, of course I could observe plenty of gems of wisdom:

<davidfetter> domas, well, as tom lane once said, there’s no limit to how quickly you can get an answer if it doesn’t have to be correct

And an hour later:

<rawtaz> are you one of those mysql lovers?

…

<dim> nobody wants performance at the price of correctness, right?

<dim> as Tom said, I can be as quick as you want as providing an answer if you don’t want it to be correct (hint: 42.)

Apparently chasing these performance variations is…

<Snow-Man> tbh, I’m of the opinion that we’re losing the forest for the trees.

Can’t say that all of them were encouraging:

<sterncera> If you can’t be bothered to subscribe to -hackers, maybe you shouldn’t be mailing it

Special thanks goes to mastermind, who not only didn’t lose his temper, but stayed focused on the topic and resisted my trolling :-) I really want PG to be greatly performing database (and I’ve seen some great numbers from it), but the amazing amount of ignorance and animosity they have against MySQL makes it somewhat complicated there though :(

P.S. Now all benchmarks I did are tainted and will need full rerun…