Oracle 10g vs PostgreSQL 8 vs MySQL 5

Lewis Cunningham | Aug 22, 2005

Article republished from IT Toolbox under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

This is my comparison of installing and getting started with Oracle 10g, PostgreSQL 8 and MySQL 5. This is what I consider the comparison of state of the art for three categories of DB: Commercial vs. Academe vs. Internet Model. This is a comparison from the view of a new user wanting to install a database to learn. I'm trying to keep the viewpoint of a home or small business user.

License

I will not get into a debate over open source and closed source. Oracle is a commercial database and requires licensing to use. MySQL and PostgreSQL are both open source projects. Oracle provides a free developers license for you to "test out" and create prototypes.

Configuration

I am installing on an older machine with 256 Megs of Ram and a 40 Gig hard drive. The CPU is a 633 Mhz Celeron. The OS is Windows 2000 Professional. I want to install at the low end of the spectrum to gauge the ability for home user type installations.

OS

I chose to perform this comparison under Windows, as I believe that that is still the most common platform that new people to the world of databases will use. By that, I mean people installing at home. For new corporate users, the odds are good that they will not have a choice of either OS or database so a comparison is pointless.

Versions

• PostgreSQL 8.0 - PostgreSQL 8.0 is a very new product. I chose 8.0 as it is the latest version and it natively supports Windows. This is the first version that actually does support Windows without an emulator or third-party recompilation.

• MySQL - MySQL 5.0 is also a very new product. As a matter of a fact, the version I used, v5.0.4, is actually a beta version. I argued with myself about whether I should use the stable v4 or the beta v5. I chose v5 because v4 does not compete with PostgreSQL or Oracle. V4 does not have stored procedures, triggers, views, etc. Without those features, I would not consider it as a contender. The upside to that is that v5 does support those features.

• Oracle 10g - This is the latest version of Oracle and was released last year. In my opinion, Oracle 10g is the gold standard of databases. Nevertheless, I also recognize that it is very expensive and requires quite a bit of knowledge to support in a production environment.

I am ranking this comparison on six factors:

1. Documentation and Getting Started Support
2. Ease of installation
3. Ease of Verifying Successful Installation
4. Creation of Non-Admin User
5. Time to Run First Query
6. Resource Requirements

Ranking Values: I rank each factor a score of 1 through 10, with 10 being the best or highest.