KULUA
This presentation titled "Dolphins vs Elephants: A comparison of MySQL and PostgreSQL" by Revolution Systems provides a comprehensive technical comparison between the two popular open-source database systems. The talk covers key architectural differences, highlighting MySQL's multiple storage engines versus PostgreSQL's single unified approach, licensing and governance models, and their contrasting development philosophies - MySQL originally focusing on speed while PostgreSQL emphasized features and standards compliance. It examines data type capabilities, where PostgreSQL offers significantly richer built-in types including geographic, network, and custom composite types compared to MySQL's more basic offerings, as well as performance characteristics showing PostgreSQL's superior scalability under concurrent load and more extensive tuning options. The presentation includes compelling real-world case studies from FeedLounge and Yahoo, demonstrating PostgreSQL's efficiency gains and massive scalability potential, with Yahoo processing 24 billion events daily on a petabyte-scale system, ultimately positioning PostgreSQL as the more feature-rich, standards-compliant, and scalable solution for complex applications.