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0 pointsmst4y ago0 comments

> I'm an infrastructure dev, not an DBA or an advanced SQL user, I never used window functions, or wrote a query that filled half the screen, or have a thick web of foreign keys ... If you keep things damn simple so you have confidence in efficiency and performance, then MySQL works pretty damn well in my experience, and Postgres, for all its academic correctness and advanced query feature set, has been pretty damn annoying.

At that point you're effectively using MySQL as a key/value store with an SQL interface, rather than a full RDBMS.

Which is, in fact, pretty much exactly what MySQL was originally designed to be and it's extremely good at it.

> If you keep things damn simple so you have confidence in efficiency and performance

I can have that level of confidence on a minimally tuned (albeit sensibly indexed, you still have to make sure the indices you need -exist- on anything, realistically) postgres at levels of schema/query complexity where getting mysql to handle it -at all- would be ... an experience.

Having used both extensively, I'd say that there's a lot of knowledge when using mysql that's basically "introducing complexity into your application and query pattern to work around the optimiser being terrible at doing the sensible thing" and then there's lots of knowledge when administrating postgresql that's "having to pick and choose lots of details about your topology and configuration because you get a giant bag of parts rather than something that's built to handle the common cases out of the box".

So ... on the one hand, I'm sufficiently spoiled by being able to use multi column keys, complex joins, subqueries, group by etc. and rarely have to even think about it because the query will perform just fine that I vastly prefer postgres by default as an apps developer these days.

On the other hand, I do very much remember the learning curve in terms of getting a deployment I was happy with and if I hadn't had a project that flat out required those things to be performant I might never have gotten around to trying it.

So, in summary: They've chosen very different trade-offs, and which set of downsides is more annoying is very dependent on the situation at and.

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da_chicken4y ago

> Having used both extensively, I'd say that there's a lot of knowledge when using mysql that's basically "introducing complexity into your application and query pattern to work around the optimiser being terrible at doing the sensible thing" and then there's lots of knowledge when administrating postgresql that's "having to pick and choose lots of details about your topology and configuration because you get a giant bag of parts rather than something that's built to handle the common cases out of the box".

This completely maps to my experience as well. I still believe Postgres' defaults being set to use an absolute minimum footprint, especially prior to PostgreSQL 9, significantly impacted it's adoption. It's better now, although IMO it could still do with an easier configuration where you could flag the install as dev/shared or prod/standalone to provide more sensible settings for the most common situations. Like, gosh, I'd like to be able to stand up an instance and easily tell it to use 90% of the system memory instead of 100 MB or whatever it was.

But the MySQL issues were much worse. Outer join and subquery problems, the lack of functions like ROW_NUMBER(), a a default storage engine that lacked transactions and fsync(), foreign keys that don't do anything, etc. I've met so many people who think MySQL limitations are RDBMS limitations, or don't understand database fundamentals because MySQL just didn't implement them properly. Then again, I also remember when the best reason to use MySQL was the existence of GROUP_CONCAT(), which everything else lacked for religious reasons.

I also vividly remember prior to MySQL 5.5 when new users of PostgreSQL, Oracle, or MS SQL Server would discover that, instead of making a guess for what you wanted, the RDBMS would actually return error messages and expect you to understand and solve them deterministically. And somehow they would be angry about it! Old MySQL (mostly 3.3, but 4.0 and 4.1, too) used to silently truncate data, or allow things like February 31 in a date field, or silently allow non-deterministic GROUP BY, or only reporting warnings when you explicitly asked for them really undermined the perception of MySQL to database folks. This wasn't that long ago, either.

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da_chicken4y ago

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