Benchmarking SQL drivers

Well, now that the dust has settled, it was/is time to compare the results
with other drivers:

I ran a benchmark over a table with 1163 entries, 10 columns.
Where a (very straightforward) SELECT pulls 166 of those entries out,
returning two columns.  The intent is to benchmark the driver, not the
quality of the SQL engine.
I open a single connection to the database.
I run 10 queries in rapid succession (big_query), fetch
all results using fetch_row().
And run those 10 queries in a loop for 394 times.

What I measure is throughput to/from the database, the queries probably
are IO-bound (they fit in the database cache) by the network(latencies).  The
database is on a different machine on the same ethernet.

11.3s  pgsql    Pike 8.1 (new driver, multithreaded)
17.3s  MySQL    Pike 8.1
18.4s  pgsql    Pike 7.8 (old driver, single threaded)
32.7s  postgres Pike 8.1 (C-libpq)

MySQL daemon runs 5.5.39.
PostgreSQL server runs 9.3.4.

Running the tests multiple times shows a variation of the timings
of less than 1%.  The database server was idle most of the time.

Running multiple queries at the same time over the same connection will
likely reveal that you can run (up to a certain amount) multiple queries
simultaneously without consuming extra wallclock time.
However since the other three drivers do not support that, a comparison
benchmark will be pointless.
-- 
Stephen.