Who Cares How Fast You Can Query, How Fast Can You Insert?

So I was chatting on IRC with Jim Nasby and he mentioned he was talking to someone who worked for Cox cable, which is a big cable tv/internet company located mostly in the eastern US. (They also happen to be my cable and internet providor). I mentioned to him that a while back they had been thinking of swapping from my$ql to PostgreSQL but it hadn’t really panned out. He reminded me thier problem was they were unable to get PostgreSQL to load data fast enough. The irony comes in that I was talking to the CTO of a rather high traffic website and he pointed out to me that they had made use of both Oracle and my$ql but ended up makeing use of PostgreSQL because they could not get data to be inserted and indexed fast enough; this was even after talking with thier local my$ql office. So I guess it’s all relative…. though I still tend to believe Cox could figure a way to make the switch if they wanted to. I hear they may be taking another look… we’ll see what happens.