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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 59 The option to compress read-only tables, but still have direct access to the rows in the table, gives you better performance by minimising disk reads. This is very useful when you are archiving things. See Section 4.7.4 [myisampack], page 279. MySQL Server has internal support for full-text search. See Section 6.8 [Fulltext Search], page 485. You can access many databases from the same connection (depending, of course, on your privileges). MySQL Server is coded from the start to be multi-threaded, while PostgreSQL uses processes. Context switching and access to common storage areas is much faster be- tween threads than between separate processes. This gives MySQL Server a big speed advantage in multi-user applications and also makes it easier for MySQL Server to take full advantage of symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems. MySQL Server has a much more sophisticated privilege system than PostgreSQL. While PostgreSQL only supports INSERT, SELECT, and UPDATE/DELETE grants per user on a database or a table, MySQL Server allows you to dene a full set of dierent privileges on the database, table, and column level. MySQL Server also allows you to specify the privilege on host and user combinations. See Section 4.3.1 [GRANT], page 212. MySQL Server supports a compressed client/server protocol which improves perfor- mance over slow links. MySQL Server employs a \table handler" concept, and is the only relational database we know of built around this concept. This allows dierent low-level table types to be called from the SQL engine, and each table type can be optimised for dierent performance characteristics. All MySQL table types (except InnoDB) are implemented as les (one table per le), which makes it really easy to back up, move, delete, and even symlink databases and tables, even when the server is down. Tools to repair and optimise MyISAM tables (the most common MySQL table type). A repair tool is only needed when a physical corruption of a datale happens, usually from a hardware failure. It allows a majority of the data to be recovered. Upgrading MySQL Server is painless. When you are upgrading MySQL Server, you don't need to dump/restore your data, as you have to do with most PostgreSQL up- grades. Drawbacks with MySQL Server compared to PostgreSQL: The transaction support in MySQL Server is not yet as well tested as PostgreSQL's system. Because MySQL Server uses threads, which are not yet awless on many OSes, one must either use binaries from http://www.mysql.com/downloads/, or carefully follow our instructions on http://www.mysql.com/doc/I/n/Installing_source.html to get an optimal binary that works in all cases. Table locking, as used by the non-transactional MyISAM tables, is in many cases faster than page locks, row locks, or versioning. The drawback, however, is that if one doesn't take into account how table locks work, a single long-running query can block a table for updates for a long time. This can usually be avoided when designing the application.

MySQL Reference Manual

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