On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Paul Zwarts wrote:

Can anyone offer advice between using Postgres over Cygwin on Nt4/5 vs. MySql as itself? It sounds a bit dodgy having to use a shell to run it... Sounds like using Photoshop through VirtualPC on a Mac....

You're not running PostgreSQL through a *Shell*. Cygwin is really a library of UNIX & POSIX calls to Windowns equivalent. All the stuff that comes w/Cygwin (compilers, cmd-line utils, and yes, a shell or two) are just (generally unmodified or lightly-patched) standard Unix programs that have been compiled against this translation library. It's not a dodgy scheme per se--most of the time people port a program to another OS, they're wrapping system calls to a translation library. (And if they develop something as 'cross-platform', they're usually just doing it from the start). When one does this w/cygwin, it's just more apparent, b/c teh translation library is an outside program. All that being said, there are significant differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Without trying to fan the flames of the war: MySQL * is easier to install * may be faster for SELECTs from your database * is smaller * does not include many standard DB features in the standard MySQL setup (such as subqueries, transactions, procedural languages, views, etc.); some of these, like transactions, may be available when using alternate backends to the MySQL parser, however, this seems quite new and untested. * runs on Windows and almost-everything Unix PostgreSQL * has signficantly more serious DB features (transactions, subqueries, views, procedural languages user-definable data types, etc.) * is a bit harder to install * may be faster for INSERTs/DELETEs for many concurrent users * runs on almost everything Unix, and with, cygwin, Windows NT/2000 The additional features of PostgreSQL, IMHO, are important and helpful for me as a developer--especially procedural languages (Perl, Tcl, and PL/PGSQL--an Oracle-like PL--are built into the database.) If what you want to do is just stash stuff away and get it back through relatively simple queries, w/o much worry about data integrity checking, etc., MySQL may be easier to get there. Not many people are using PostgreSQL under Windows, however. On Unix, the program has proven very stable; under Windows, I think there aren't enough users for me to feel the same confidence. If you're stuck w/Windows as your database server platform, another fair option is Interbase, another GPLd database. It has the advantages of excellent documentation (MySQL is clear but not enough detail, PostgreSQL can be fuzzy at points but there's plenty of it), and very nice GUI administration tools. It runs out of the box on Windows NT, and offers some of the features that MySQL doesn't (subqueries, transactions, etc.) Followups should probably go to the PostgreSQL or MySQL mailing lists. HTH, -- Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org> Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington