So, slashdot had “a story about the new Falcon storage engine for MySQL”:http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/69904889/article.pl. I don’t care for MySQL for a number of reasons, but some–though not all–could be alleviated with a better storage back-end. So I cruised over to check out “the Falcon feature-set”:http://www.mysql.org/doc/refman/5.1/en/se-falcon-features.html.
Funny enough, with the exception of the next to the last point–which is a potentially non-trivial point, I admit–this is all stuff that PostgreSQL has had for years.
One day, people are going to realize that MySQL has been playing catch-up for the last few years. The amount of effort people have to do to work around MySQL’s long-standing issues with concurrency and lack of ACID-compliance in its default configuration, and it’s lack of good performance in the configurations that _do_ have those characteristics always amazes me, especially when PostgreSQL has Simply Worked for a long, long time.
