The limits of MySql, and the possible advantages of PostGreSQL

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

I feel like I hit the limits of MySql today. We had built a site that depended on a lot of database views. These views did 4 table joins on tables that had perhaps 40,000 records. This was on a site that gets perhaps 300,000 unique visitors a month. The site worked well on our dev server, but once we pushed our changes out to the live site, the servers suffered terribly and became non-responsive repeatedly. The problem was that views in MySql throw away all the indexes on the underlying tables. I suddenly realized why some people prefer PostGreSQL. With some triggers, you can get PostGreSQL to support materialized views, which is what we really needed today.