I'm old. I know that there was no postgresql 4. The first release of postgresql was 6, and what I said was accurate as of the release of version 6, in 1997 or 1998.
I never expected the very geek joke to be understood. Very cool!
On a more serious note, I didn't mean to support the ever old myth that postgresql is slower than mysql. It hasn't been the case for over ten years, and all the while being a better database in every aspect.
However, go back enough and it was slower (than mysql) for real-world loads. You could get near enough if you disabled fsync, but then were negating many of the advantages of pgsql. Even then, in the old days, table based locking would kill a real database. Table based locking was solved early enough ('98? '99? around that time). Fsync was solved with WAL, in the performance effort of the early 7.x series. It was around late '2000 that I came back to postgresql for good. Until then, it was either mysql for a quick hack or oracle for anything serious. Since then, it's postgresql for everything (I don't deal with the scenarios where Oracle still leads).
