Sun Microsystems had recently published a test of the PostgreSQL system, which showed PostgreSQL results that were about 12% lower than an Oracle database system running on a comparably priced HP Itanium system, an outcome that Josh Berkus, a core contributor to the PostgreSQL open source project, called "a good day for open source." Peter Zaisev says the Benchmark Results List shows that MySQL Scores 720.56 and PostgreSQL scores 778.14 JOPS on 12 cores. This seems to show PostgreSQL is some 10% faster, from the glance view. But, the hardware is different - MySQL benchmark use Sun Fire X4100 available in Nov 2005 using Opteron 285 CPU, PostgreSQL benchmarks use Sun Fire X4200 M2 available in September 2006, using AMD Opteron 2220 SE.

Peter adds other things he noticed "The other big issue is using MySQL 5.0.27 which has Innodb scalability issues, which were a lot improved in 5.0.37 which I’d expect to show significant gains. This is not to mention specific tuning for Benchmark which could be performed on database engine level. As Josh now seems to be working for Sun I expect there is significant optimizations which could be done (if they are required)."