Chapter 21. PostgreSQL

As discussed in Chapter 15, any relational database that is to be trusted with production data should be ACID-compliant. PostgreSQL is the most popular open-source relational database that is always ACID-complaint. You can achieve ACID compliance in a MySQL database if you use the InnoDB or the NDB storage engines. (As of this writing, the MySQL team is developing other ACID-compliant storage engines.) With PostgreSQL, all data is stored in an ACID-compliant fashion. PostgreSQL also offers sophisticated features such as point-in-time recovery, tablespaces, checkpoints, hot backups, and write ahead logging for fault tolerance. These are all very good things from a data-protection and data-integrity standpoint.