Greetings
I work for the Federal Government in my country and due to costs cuts, we're currently running an open source migration project.
So far we have workstations and file/printing servers, dns and dhcp migrated. In this project is the migration of the intranet, from IIS/.NET/SQL Server to Apache/PHP/????.

The ???? would be MySQL or PostgreSQL, but I really don't have any kind of experience with any of those. Are there major diferences between them?

Thanks

MySQL seems to be more supported in open source projects than postgreSQL. Postgresql seems more complete, "featuresfull" than mysql however.

PostgreSQL in my opinion, but do some research on them both..


here's a link to get you started:

http://www.devx.com/dbzone/Article/20743

Another interesting aspect:

http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html
http://sql-info.de/postgresql/postgres-gotchas.html


My personal preference is PostgreSQL for the aforementioned
"completeness". It (to the best of my knowledge) incorprates
more of the SQLXX standards than MySQL does.


Cheers,
Tink

i use lapp... linux, apache, php and postgresql. i love the setup and postgresql is an amazing db. not an amazing OSS db, but an amazing db, period.

mysql does have a general speed advantage over postgresql in most cases, but postgresql, as has been mentioned, is a more complete db.

the speed advantage, to me was less important (basically, inconsequential as postgresql performs admirably) than the completeness of the db. as h/w continues to improve, it will become less and less important, not to mention postgresql is working on improving speed (as i'm sure mysql is, too).

postgresql has full foreign key support, which is important to me. the latest mysql may have foreign key support, but they definitely didn't not too long ago. i like postgresql's transaction support - and it has a few more goodies, too.

i also use a db abstraction layer called ADOdb. i find that it works very nicely for my needs. the documentation is good and will minimize code changes if you switch to another db.

sesamestreet.org uses a LAPP setup, too. check out their site to gauge performance. they get nearly 500k hits a month.

i also recommend taking a hard look at Manuel Lemos' form generation and validation php class available via phpclasses.net. i use it and like it a lot. Manuel Lemos is also an active participant in his mailing list and has been very helpful in my effort to learn and apply his class.

you liekly are planning to implement CSS. if not, rethink your approach. CSS is extremely nice once you get your layout down and cross browser compatible (which will likely not be an easy task due to various browser bugs).

best of luck.

Postgres supports Kerberos and other methods of authentication - MySQL seems to only support its own internal list of users and passwords. This was the deciding feature for me to pick Postgres.