Physical tuning techniques in two DBMSs

Abstract

Are there any differences in the performance between tuning techniques in MySQL and PostgreSQL? What tuning techniques do they support? Do the tuning techniques actually improve the performance? It should be easy to answer these questions, but the fact is that it is not. There is a wide range of benchmark tests available that compare DBMSs, but the focus tends to be more on the general overall performance than on the specific performance of tuning techniques that can be implemented on these databases. The goal of this study was to compare different tuning techniques between Open Source Databases and also investigate if there were any differences between the databases in the way they managed Binary Large Object data. The research was limited to comparing the two Open Source Databases MySQL and PostgreSQL against each other. The research problem was: "are there any significant differences in the untuned and tuned performance of queries between MySQL and PostgreSQL?" The results showed that there was a significant difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL with regards to indexes, BLOB management and denormalisation. Looking at the overall performance of the two DBMSs, PostgreSQL was also significantly faster than MySQL.