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FOSDEM PWA

PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives

UB2.252A (Lameere) | Day 1 | 10:30 - 11:20 | Speakers: Rohit Nayak, Shlomi Noach, Ben Dicken, Pep Pla

PostgreSQL and MySQL, Two Databases, Three Perspectives
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Notes

Abstract

In this session, four seasoned database administrators with sound knowledge of both PostgreSQL and MySQL present an unbiased comparison of the two technologies. Attendees will learn about the architectural and DX differences between the world's two most popular databases.

Pep Pla, with his peculiar sense of humour, will open the session with a deep dive into the MVCC architectures between the two. The audience will learn why we need MVCC. Postgres and MySQL take very different approaches to implementation: Postgres relies on row versioning and vacuuming dead tuples, while MySQL does in-place changes and tracks versions with the undo log.

A broad-strokes overview from Ben Dicken, who has worked closely with both, will emphasize where ecosystem cross-pollination would help. This includes differences in table storage, bloat management, replication, and process-per-connection vs thread-per-connection architecture.

Postgres and MySQL take fundamentally different approaches to logical replication. Rohit Nayak and Shlomi Noach will examine how these designs affect WAL/binlog retention, backpressure, and CDC workloads, explore their failover implications, and highlight key feature-parity gaps between the two systems.

Speakers

Rohit Nayak

Rohit Nayak is a software engineer with over three decades of experience in all aspects of software development especially with startups and in product development. He has been part of the core Vitess team at PlanetScale for the last six years and a Vitess Maintainer for five. Over the last year he has been working with PostgreSQL building replication tools at-scale.

Shlomi Noach

Engineer at PlanetScale working on Vitess, MySQL and Postgres scaling solutions. Maintainer for open source Vitess, Previously at GitHub. Interested in database infrastructure solutions such as high availability, reliability, schema management, enablement, automation and testing. Shlomi is the author of orchestrator, gh-ost and other open source tools.

Ben Dicken

Hi, I'm Ben! I spend my days researching, benchmarking, and writing about all things databases and distributed systems. I'm currently in developer education at PlanetScale, and was formerly both a computer science faculty member and a research software engineer at a small database company.

Find me on X: https://x.com/benjdicken Or LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/benjdicken

Pep Pla

Pep has been working with databases all his life. Born in a small village by the Mediterranean, he currently lives in Barcelona. He loves tech, traveling, good food, music and, all things NASA. He hates talking about himself in the third person and has a particular sense of humor. Happily married, he is the father of three boys and three cats.

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