Ask HN: Any one still using MySQL?

[aloknnikhil]

Do you manage your own MySQL installation? - If not, what managed provider do you use? - Either way, what’s your biggest pain point?

Why not Postgres?

[lemme_tell_ya]

> Any one still using MySQL?

Yes, but more so MariaDB

> Do you manage your own MySQL installation?

Yes and no, depends on the environment.

> what managed provider do you use?

RDS

> what’s your biggest pain point?

Nothing initially comes to mind.

> Why not Postgres?

Habit? It's what I learned with and just kept using. I understand it's permission model better than Postgres. I know how to back it up, restore, and replicate. At one time (not sure if this is still the case) it was noticeably cheaper than Postgres in AWS for our use cases.

Some legacy systems can't be migrated to postgres even if we wanted.

I've used Postgres and it has some nice features, especially with it's data types but often find myself lost with it's way of doing things. When possible I reach for SQLite instead of MySQL.

[freefaler]

MySQL and derivatives are also faster, because they're simpler and you can use different storage engines for different tasks.

[cholmon]

Yes, but MariaDB, mostly DIY on localhost (various test & live VMs I manage).

Most painful? Replication with automatic failover could be easier to setup. Considering switching to MySQL 8.x for the new-ish innodb cluster tools (mysqlsh, mysql-router).

Why not Postgres? Familiarity, mostly using it for Drupal & Wordpress sites where MySQL is king. Besides the occasional poorly-designed query that eats memory and causes timeouts, MySQL rarely needs my attention.

Side note: I'm excited for https://github.com/mydumper/mydumper. Multi-threaded logical backups, 2 to 5 times faster than mysqldump. It's not super stable yet, so we haven't been relying on it for long term backups, but doing a "mydumper to grab a schema on live, rsync down to laptop, myloader to import" it's been a big time saver.

[verdverm]

Similar-ish project to mydumper for Postgres ecosystem: https://www.peerdb.io/

[aloknnikhil]

Very cool! Thanks for sharing mydumper

[rokkamokka]

Still using mysql here for a medium large 10+ year old application. We self-host one master and two replicated slaves. Biggest pain point we've had is issues with locking and transaction timeouts as the application has gained users, but this isn't really mysqls fault.

We've never seen the point of converting to postgres, a lot of work for little if any gain?

[jitl]

I think Postgres has more features, MySQL has more scalability. Citus exists for Postgres but seems to have a much smaller community compared to MySQL active active replication or Vitess/Planetscale. I would probably pick Postgres for personal projects, but potentially consider MySQL/Planetscale for something that needs to hold petabytes.

[HeckFeck]

Using MySQL for private infrastructure and using Postgres for our production app.

No strong reasons for it, but I wanted to try psql after decades of toying with MySQL. I like it despite its weird insistence on snake case for everything.

[verdverm]

The Zalando Operator for Postgres is pretty great

[rietta]

Yes. I prefer PostgreSQL but more than a few clients who were already built on MySQL are still using it or MariaDB. As for managed provider, typically AWS RDS, or a few are still directly hosted. MariaDB is easy to run natively for a small to medium site on a VPS.

Biggest pain points are pretty much transactions around schema changes (Ruby on Rails context) meaning is possible to trash a database with changes that go wrong. Also implementing full text search is always a bit harder than it is with PostgreSQL. The capability is there but end up having to do custom queries.

[gmiller123456]

Of course. Why Postgres and not MySQL?

[spudlyo]

This is like asking why people choose Coke over Pepsi; they're both satisfying and sweet fizzy beverages, and they both can hurt you the more you're exposed to them. Much of people's preferences for one or the other can be written off as frequency bias. Many of us in the industry have scar tissue from battles with both.

[aloknnikhil]

Fair question. My motivation was mainly to understand if there was something specific that drove that choice. Better question for you maybe: For any new project, which one would you choose and why?

[geenat]

Vitess

Planetscale

Lack of simple HA in Citus is a big pain point.

[pacifika]

WordPress is not compatible with Postgres.

[alserio]

mysql e pg have different performance characteristics, it is not trivial to migrate existing applications between them. Overall, MySQL 8 has gotten a lot better than it used to be. Sometimes the query planner can be a bit stupid on some complex queries, but that is true sometimes also for pg.

[slake]

Not an answer to this question. Is there a Postgres.app equivalent for mysql on MacOs?

[nittanymount]

seems it is still in many systems, guess database is not easy to migrate, and does not bother to if no real need...

[verdverm]

yup, via Dolt (git+mysql)

[p2hari]

hjskvh