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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

62 MySQL Technical Reference for Version 4.0.3 at and should give you a notion about things to avoid and what you may have to do in other ways. We know of two benchmark tests that claim that PostgreSQL performs better than MySQL Server. These both where multi-user tests, a test that we here at MySQL AB haven't had time to write and include in the benchmark suite, mainly because it's a big task to do this in a manner that is fair to all databases. One is the benchmark paid for by Great Bridge, the company that for 16 months attempted to build a business based on PostgreSQL but now has ceased operations. This is probably the worst benchmark we have ever seen anyone conduct. This was not only tuned to only test what PostgreSQL is absolutely best at, but it was also totally unfair to every other database involved in the test. Note: We know that even some of the main PostgreSQL developers did not like the way Great Bridge conducted the benchmark, so we don't blame the PostgreSQL team for the way the benchmark was done. This benchmark has been condemned in a lot of postings and newsgroups, so here we will just brie y repeat some things that were wrong with it. The tests were run with an expensive commercial tool that makes it impossible for an Open Source company like us to verify the benchmarks, or even check how the benchmarks were really done. The tool is not even a true benchmark tool, but an application/setup testing tool. To refer to this as a \standard" benchmark tool is to stretch the truth a long way. Great Bridge admitted that they had optimised the PostgreSQL database (with VACUUM before the test) and tuned the startup for the tests, something they hadn't done for any of the other databases involved. They say \This process optimises indexes and frees up disk space a bit. The optimised indexes boost performance by some margin." Our benchmarks clearly indicate that the dierence in running a lot of selects on a database with and without VACUUM can easily dier by a factor of 10. The test results were also strange. The AS3AP test documentation mentions that the test does \selections, simple joins, projections, aggregates, one-tuple updates, and bulk updates." PostgreSQL is good at doing SELECTs and JOINs (especially after a VACUUM), but doesn't perform as well on INSERTs or UPDATEs. The benchmarks seem to indicate that only SELECTs were done (or very few updates). This could easily explain the good results for PostgreSQL in this test. The bad results for MySQL will be obvious a bit down in this document. They did run the so-called benchmark from a Windows machine against a Linux ma- chine over ODBC, a setup that no normal database user would ever do when running a heavy multi-user application. This tested more the ODBC driver and the Windows protocol used between the clients than the database itself. When running the database against Oracle and MS-SQL (Great Bridge has indirectly indicated the databases they used in the test), they didn't use the native protocol but instead ODBC. Anyone that has ever used Oracle knows that all real applications use the native interface instead of ODBC. Doing a test through ODBC and claiming that the results had anything to do with using the database in a real-world situation can't be

MySQL Reference Manual

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