They’re not wrong. If you’ve ever spent meaningful time administering both, you’ll know that Postgres takes far more hands-on work to keep it going.
To be clear, I like both. Postgres has a lot more features, and is far more extensible. But there’s no getting around the fact that its MVCC implementation means that at scale, you have to worry about things that simply do not exist for MySQL: vacuuming, txid wraparound, etc.
My experience has been exactly opposite. Ability to do Vacuums is good. MySQL doesn’t free up space taken by deleted rows. The only option to free up the space is to mysqldump the db and load it again. Not practical in most of the situations.
Early MySQL versions made egregious design choices like quietly ignoring missing foreign keys and enum typos, truncating long strings, and randomly choosing rows from groups.
Yeah, it was bad. What kills me is SQLite has its own absurd set of gotchas [0] yet is seen as amazing and wonderful by devs. PKs can have NULLs? Sure! Strings can have \0 in the middle of them? Why not? FKs aren’t enforced by default? Yeah, who needs referential integrity, anyway?
My only conclusion is that the majority of devs don’t actually read documentation, and rely purely on the last blog post they read to influence their infrastructure decisions.
I am a database specialist and have worn the DBA had for many years. I have run MySQL and Postgres in production, both self-hosted and using managed services. Postgres wins on every single dimension that matters, every time. Yes MySQL is easier to setup for non-experts. That counts for nothing.
If you are sticking up for MySQL in this thread... I just don't even know, man.
sgarland|1 year ago
To be clear, I like both. Postgres has a lot more features, and is far more extensible. But there’s no getting around the fact that its MVCC implementation means that at scale, you have to worry about things that simply do not exist for MySQL: vacuuming, txid wraparound, etc.
lelanthran|1 year ago
That was true in 2012; dunno if it still applies though.
pritambarhate|1 year ago
wbl|1 year ago
erik_seaberg|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230922210124/https://grimoire....
sgarland|1 year ago
My only conclusion is that the majority of devs don’t actually read documentation, and rely purely on the last blog post they read to influence their infrastructure decisions.
[0]: https://www.sqlite.org/quirks.html
Propelloni|1 year ago
MySQL was immortalized as the database in every LAMP stack. And just like PHP it improved considerably since then.
p_l|1 year ago
slotrans|1 year ago
I am a database specialist and have worn the DBA had for many years. I have run MySQL and Postgres in production, both self-hosted and using managed services. Postgres wins on every single dimension that matters, every time. Yes MySQL is easier to setup for non-experts. That counts for nothing.
If you are sticking up for MySQL in this thread... I just don't even know, man.