alt Hacker NewsWhy does Postgres get so much love, and MySQL/MariaDB get nothing?
I'm assuming it's largely because Postgres has more momentum, and is much more extensible, but if you're just trying to do 'boring DB stuff' I find it's faster for most use cases. Development has slowed, but it would be hard to argue that it's not battle tested and robust.
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Funny that it was the other way around 20 years ago. Everybody was using MySQL, but there were many blog posts and such about the looseness of MySQL with the SQL standard and other issues. And that people should use Postgres unless they need the replication features of MySQL. AFAIU, replication is still the main (good) reason to use MySQL, though there are some semi-proprietary(?) solutions for Postgres.
I am not an expert, but I have worked somewhere MariaDB/MySQL was being used at scale.
My preference today for Postgres comes down to the fact that its query planner is much easier to understand and interface with, whereas MySQL/Maria would be fine 29/30 times but would then absolutely fuck you with an awful query plan that you needed a lot of experience with to anticipate.
Because MySQL got a (rightfully so) bad rap before it adopted InnoDB as the default storage engine, and then tech influencers happened. I love Postgres, but I also love MySQL, and 99% of the time I see people gushing about Postgres, they aren’t using any features that MySQL doesn’t have.
The single biggest thing for MySQL that should be a huge attraction for devs without RDBMS administration experience is that MySQL, by and large, doesn’t need much care and feeding. You’re not going to get paged for txid wraparound because you didn’t know autovacuum wasn’t keeping up on your larger tables. Unfortunately, the Achilles heel of MySQL (technically InnoDB) is also its greatest strength: its clustering index. This is fantastic for range queries, IFF you design your schema to exploit it, and don’t use a non-k-sortable PK like UUIDv4. Need to grab every FooRecord for a given user? If your PK is (user_id, <some_other_id>) then congrats, they’re all physically colocated on the same DB pages, and the DB only has to walk the B+tree once from the root node, then it just follows a linked list.