MySQL and PostgreSQL are two most popular relational database management systems (RDBMS), which are available as open source products. Each one of these two RDBMSs has a strong community behind to support and develop them further. As both of them are open source, popular and provides huge list of supported features, people involved in developing software applications, often get confused as to which DBMS should be used as a backend for the system they need to develop. To come to a conclusion, developers often compare these database management systems at business management level as well as application development level. In this article, we will see the comparison between MySQL and PostgreSQL at these two levels.

Business Management Level:
Most of the people at business management level are non technical people. They generally think about how quickly the software application could be developed and the cost involved in maintaining it. Apart from this, they also want the application to be faster as well as reliable. As far as performance is concerned, PostgreSQL is slower in executing most of the queries and also requires more memory as compared to MySQL. If you do a simple search on GetAFreelancer.com for projects with MySQL as well as for projects involving PostgreSQL, you will notice that there are hardly any projects which require people who know PostgreSQL. This is because; it's easier and cheaper to find people who know MySQL as compared to PostgreSQL. This shows us that, in terms of performance and maintenance, MySQL performs far better than PostgreSQL. Thus most of the people at business management level prefer MySQL.

Application Development Level:
Most of the technical guys like developers and quality analysts are at application development level. Technical people think about performance of the application they are developing too, but they are also concerned about increasing their productivity. Thus, they prefer to use tools that come with lot of useful features. PostgreSQL supports large number of features like stored procedures and triggers which developers could use to increase the efficiency of operations which needs to be perform on the data stored in the database. Using stored procedures and triggers, it is possible to implement features like data validation, data migration and logging within the database itself.

But on the other hand, application developers need to make sure that the application being developed is easier to maintain as well. For developers, an easily maintainable system is the one, in which new features could be added, without changing lot of existing functionality. This means, that developers will have to write their queries in such a way that they will be supported by most of the existing database management systems, which are present in market today. In this way, they could ensure that, even if the underlying database engine is changed, the application developed by them will continue to run without making any radical changes. Due to this, most of the developers use MySQL in their professional projects, even though they personally prefer PostgreSQL.

So which RDBMS should I use in my next project? Well, this is not a new question anymore. You will find lots of forum threads around this topic, but the answer is still, 'It all depends on the situation and requirements'.

Learn more about this author, Anay Kamat.
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