8 ms·

Slightly tangential but I'm genuinely curious, does any have a theory as to why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL

by jrcii 10y ago

Slightly tangential but I'm genuinely curious, does any have a theory as to why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL or MariaDB? Considering the relative obscurity of the former it seems somewhat inexplicable.

fbernier 10y ago
I guess it depends on your own personal background, but PostgreSQL is far from 'obscure' and much more feature complete than MySQL nowadays.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  Why "nowadays"? I can't really remember a time when it wasn't. If anything, MySQL is far less incomplete than it once was (like, it even supports transactions now, which once was one of the most important reasons for using Postgres over MySQL).
Alex3917 10y ago
It's because Python tends to be the most common programming language for startups due to being easy to hire for, having good library support for a wide range of use cases, being good for web development, etc. And MySQL is focused on catering to enterprise customers who don't use Python. The last time I heard, they had something like one person working part time on Python support, so the drivers weren't nearly as reliable as the Postgres tooling.
- fbernier 10y ago
  Pretty sure there are more or at least as much startups using Ruby, JS, PHP, Java before Python.
- rco8786 10y ago
  Err, no. Python probably isn't even in the top 5 of languages startups choose for their main stack.
  - bnchrch 10y ago
    Not the most sound method but I was demonstrating the relative popularity of programming languages to my SO the other day using find in the Who's Hiring thread for May and python was the most popular. Surprised me as well.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      A ton more companies have some Python scripts than Python as a primary development language; this skews naive keyword matching assessments of job postings.
  - gaius 10y ago
    What is then? One thing that's always bemused me is that YC doesn't insist on its companies using Lisp :-)
- gnarbarian 10y ago
  seems like that would be pretty tough to get reliable stats on something like that. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index
- simonw 10y ago
  Python has had rock-solid, widely used MySQL libraries for well over a decade. I've never seen evidence that MySQL and Python aren't a strong (and popular) combination.
ddorian43 10y ago
Because.... people that use postgresql are ~usually better developers, they care more + post more + upvote more.
- misframer 10y ago
  Do you have evidence that you can share?
  - ddorian43 10y ago
    No. Just from all the devs that I've talked to, the ones that know more about rdbms prefer postgresql.
- b3550943 10y ago
  nobody cares
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
skybrian 10y ago
Relative obscurity depends on the community. While there are a lot of MySQL installations, I'm under the impression there are more Postgres fans than MySQL fans on Hacker News these days.
MBCook 10y ago
Besides the large popularity of Postgres, it seems to me (totally anecdotally) that they are more open about development than MySQL is. Or perhaps better at getting new developments noticed through PR than MySQL. When a new version of MySQL comes out it's big news, but it seems like lots of the little day-to-day as it gets developed updates in Postgres get posted.
jjawssd 10y ago
MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME Self-explanatory, really.
cwbrandsma 10y ago
MySQL is considered more "old school" and not great at being standards compliant when installed with default settings. See https://twitter.com/robconery/status/189086889486192640 https://twitter.com/robconery/status/189086889486192640 Also, MySQL is run by Oracle...and Oracle a horrible company run by horrible people that behave horribly, and should never ever be trusted in any form. Any developer relying or Oracle code should not be trusted ever again, and Oracle consultants are the vilest form of life on earth. Did I mention I don't like Oracle?
- jlgaddis 10y ago
  I am in no way a fan of Oracle but, c'mon, that's a little over the top, don't you think?
  - qaq 10y ago
    Reminds me of a talk by Bryan Cantrill he talked a bit (I am paraphrasing) that he didn't believe that people could be purely evil and when looking into Larry Ellisson he actually discovered he donated several hundred mil. to a nonprofit (dedicated to prolonging human life). On closer look it turned the sole purpose of that nonprofit was working on prolonging life of one particular human namely Larry Ellisson. (while writing off the donation from taxes to boot :).
    - the-dude 10y ago
      One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        I love it! Gotta try to remember that one!
        function_seven 10y ago
        If only there was a mnemonic to help :)
esaym 10y ago
There's been a large migration off of mysql to postgres simply because Oracle got the rights to mysql when they purchased Sun. That is what made me consider, ditching mysql. The final straw came when I stood up a mysql 5.6 instance to use as a data warehouse for about 5TB of data (15 billion rows). To my horror after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of the SQL language. Most of the needed sql features for data warehouse queries were simply not there (no WITH clause, no ROW_NUMBER(), only one sequence per table, no schema support, and many others that SQL report ninjas love to use) With that I had to go back to management and convince them to put more time into the project so we could try again with postgresql. There was a large learning curve to go to postgres. It was just different in many areas, but at the same time, reminded me alot of IBM DB2 (both were a product of the 1980's if you look at the history). Postgres fit into our plans nicely, it actually had a full blown intelligent query parser and optimizer unlike mysql. From what I learned, mysql's purpose was to stop people from using text files as storage points in the early 2000's. But once you graduate from that, it's onward to postgres from there.
- orf 10y ago
  > after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of SQL Did you not research this beforehand?
  - esaym 10y ago
    At the time, my basic experience with databases had been for normal developer CRUD type operations. I was just getting into BI analytics and stuff. MySql was kind of the defacto choice for a "free" database and it was kind of thrown at me. I didn't mind since I had used it for years and was familiar with setting it up. But no, assuming the thing with "SQL" in its name didn't actually support SQL was not on my checklist sadly.
- narrator 10y ago
  The funny thing is is that the trend for analyzing data is going from doing things in SQL databases backed data warehouses with queries to running that stuff on clusters with Spark or Hadoop based solutions.
twic 10y ago
Are the MySQL or MariaDB communities publishing interesting stuff like this? That's a genuine question - i'm no longer a MySQL user, so i don't pay any attention to what's going on myself.
- morgo 10y ago
  Yes. Mysqlserverteam.com links usually do not show up on HN, but we have similar benchmarks showing RO throughout to 1.6m qps on Intel
matthewmacleod 10y ago
Postgres is widely regarded to be a good example of an open-source project – technically excellent, with a good codebase and community. MySQL has a history of being less technically sound – although it's certainly improved, I imagine it's left a bit of a legacy. In addition, the purchase of MySQL by Oracle probably makes many developers more skeptical of using it. IME there isn't really a compelling case to use MySQL over Postgres, unless there's a specific environmental constraint.
technion 10y ago
MySQL gets more than its share of popularity and discussion elsewhere. It's still the only supported Wordpress backend, which means it's the defacto web service backend for a large portion of the Internet. It's hard for more advanced users to find anything interesting and new about it.
morgo 10y ago
lots of things happening in the MySQL world: - a couple of weeks ago we released a document store (new protocol + connectors) based on protobufs - last year 5.7 was released. Many new features, I have a list here: http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com
dorfsmay 10y ago
Your perception of PostgreSQL being obscure in comparison to MySQL is interesting... Most projects I've worked on use pg. My perception is that projects using MySQL do so because of history (project started in php and that was the default stack, it was faster at the time (before transactions), etc...).
wolf550e 10y ago
MySQL is the PHP of relational databases. You can do most things with it, but you don't choose it when you have the option to choose something better.
combatentropy 10y ago
> why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL You'll see the same phenomenon on Slashdot. MySQL is popular among a subset of programmers: web developers. In corporations, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are more popular. Further, MySQL is popular among a subset of web developers: those who use PHP. Among web developers who use Python, Postgres seems more popular. My suspicion is that MySQL's popularity is tied to those web-hosting plans (1 GB of storage! 1 TB of bandwidth! 10 databases! $10/month!). They were almost always MySQL databases. Web hosts that offered Postgres databases were few and far between. This article corroborates my theory: http://rodner.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-makes-mysql-so-popular.html http://rodner.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-makes-mysql-so-popul.... MySQL's company (which at the time was "MySQL" not Oracle) pushed it in at a critical time in the development of the web. I have written applications that use: Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle. My favorite by far is Postgres. The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.
- brisance 10y ago
  >>The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse. A lot of decisions are made holistically instead of a "purely technical standpoint". In large companies where there are still IT departments (e.g. use of Active Directory), MS is still very much the de facto platform, and SQL Server is the "logical" choice.
- tomc1985 10y ago
  While I love me some PG, SQL Server is nothing to sneeze at. Was fairly impressed with it, never had any serious issues on an under-specced server once occupied by terrible programmers
- manigandham 10y ago
  > Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse. Based on what? Both commercial databases have incredible features, tooling and extensions that leave postgres behind. Postgres today doesn't even have a solid scale-up or scale-out strategy. It does have nice SQL support and makes developer lives a little easier but this isnt anywhere close to making it the absolute winner technically.
chris_wot 10y ago
Postgres is hardly obscure.

by jrcii 10y ago

fbernier 10y ago

I guess it depends on your own personal background, but PostgreSQL is far from 'obscure' and much more feature complete than MySQL nowadays.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
Why "nowadays"? I can't really remember a time when it wasn't. If anything, MySQL is far less incomplete than it once was (like, it even supports transactions now, which once was one of the most important reasons for using Postgres over MySQL).

Alex3917 10y ago

It's because Python tends to be the most common programming language for startups due to being easy to hire for, having good library support for a wide range of use cases, being good for web development, etc. And MySQL is focused on catering to enterprise customers who don't use Python. The last time I heard, they had something like one person working part time on Python support, so the drivers weren't nearly as reliable as the Postgres tooling.

fbernier 10y ago
Pretty sure there are more or at least as much startups using Ruby, JS, PHP, Java before Python.
rco8786 10y ago
Err, no. Python probably isn't even in the top 5 of languages startups choose for their main stack.
- bnchrch 10y ago
  Not the most sound method but I was demonstrating the relative popularity of programming languages to my SO the other day using find in the Who's Hiring thread for May and python was the most popular. Surprised me as well.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    A ton more companies have some Python scripts than Python as a primary development language; this skews naive keyword matching assessments of job postings.
- gaius 10y ago
  What is then? One thing that's always bemused me is that YC doesn't insist on its companies using Lisp :-)
gnarbarian 10y ago
seems like that would be pretty tough to get reliable stats on something like that. http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index
simonw 10y ago
Python has had rock-solid, widely used MySQL libraries for well over a decade. I've never seen evidence that MySQL and Python aren't a strong (and popular) combination.

ddorian43 10y ago

Because.... people that use postgresql are ~usually better developers, they care more + post more + upvote more.

misframer 10y ago
Do you have evidence that you can share?
- ddorian43 10y ago
  No. Just from all the devs that I've talked to, the ones that know more about rdbms prefer postgresql.
b3550943 10y ago
nobody cares

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

skybrian 10y ago

Relative obscurity depends on the community. While there are a lot of MySQL installations, I'm under the impression there are more Postgres fans than MySQL fans on Hacker News these days.

MBCook 10y ago

Besides the large popularity of Postgres, it seems to me (totally anecdotally) that they are more open about development than MySQL is. Or perhaps better at getting new developments noticed through PR than MySQL. When a new version of MySQL comes out it's big news, but it seems like lots of the little day-to-day as it gets developed updates in Postgres get posted.

jjawssd 10y ago

MySQL vs PostgreSQL - Why you shouldn't use MySQL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME Self-explanatory, really.

cwbrandsma 10y ago

MySQL is considered more "old school" and not great at being standards compliant when installed with default settings. See https://twitter.com/robconery/status/189086889486192640 https://twitter.com/robconery/status/189086889486192640 Also, MySQL is run by Oracle...and Oracle a horrible company run by horrible people that behave horribly, and should never ever be trusted in any form. Any developer relying or Oracle code should not be trusted ever again, and Oracle consultants are the vilest form of life on earth. Did I mention I don't like Oracle?

jlgaddis 10y ago
I am in no way a fan of Oracle but, c'mon, that's a little over the top, don't you think?
- qaq 10y ago
  Reminds me of a talk by Bryan Cantrill he talked a bit (I am paraphrasing) that he didn't believe that people could be purely evil and when looking into Larry Ellisson he actually discovered he donated several hundred mil. to a nonprofit (dedicated to prolonging human life). On closer look it turned the sole purpose of that nonprofit was working on prolonging life of one particular human namely Larry Ellisson. (while writing off the donation from taxes to boot :).
  - the-dude 10y ago
    One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I love it! Gotta try to remember that one!
      - function_seven 10y ago
        If only there was a mnemonic to help :)

esaym 10y ago

There's been a large migration off of mysql to postgres simply because Oracle got the rights to mysql when they purchased Sun. That is what made me consider, ditching mysql. The final straw came when I stood up a mysql 5.6 instance to use as a data warehouse for about 5TB of data (15 billion rows). To my horror after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of the SQL language. Most of the needed sql features for data warehouse queries were simply not there (no WITH clause, no ROW_NUMBER(), only one sequence per table, no schema support, and many others that SQL report ninjas love to use) With that I had to go back to management and convince them to put more time into the project so we could try again with postgresql. There was a large learning curve to go to postgres. It was just different in many areas, but at the same time, reminded me alot of IBM DB2 (both were a product of the 1980's if you look at the history). Postgres fit into our plans nicely, it actually had a full blown intelligent query parser and optimizer unlike mysql. From what I learned, mysql's purpose was to stop people from using text files as storage points in the early 2000's. But once you graduate from that, it's onward to postgres from there.

orf 10y ago
> after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of SQL Did you not research this beforehand?
- esaym 10y ago
  At the time, my basic experience with databases had been for normal developer CRUD type operations. I was just getting into BI analytics and stuff. MySql was kind of the defacto choice for a "free" database and it was kind of thrown at me. I didn't mind since I had used it for years and was familiar with setting it up. But no, assuming the thing with "SQL" in its name didn't actually support SQL was not on my checklist sadly.
narrator 10y ago
The funny thing is is that the trend for analyzing data is going from doing things in SQL databases backed data warehouses with queries to running that stuff on clusters with Spark or Hadoop based solutions.

twic 10y ago

Are the MySQL or MariaDB communities publishing interesting stuff like this? That's a genuine question - i'm no longer a MySQL user, so i don't pay any attention to what's going on myself.

morgo 10y ago
Yes. Mysqlserverteam.com links usually do not show up on HN, but we have similar benchmarks showing RO throughout to 1.6m qps on Intel

matthewmacleod 10y ago

Postgres is widely regarded to be a good example of an open-source project – technically excellent, with a good codebase and community. MySQL has a history of being less technically sound – although it's certainly improved, I imagine it's left a bit of a legacy. In addition, the purchase of MySQL by Oracle probably makes many developers more skeptical of using it. IME there isn't really a compelling case to use MySQL over Postgres, unless there's a specific environmental constraint.

technion 10y ago

MySQL gets more than its share of popularity and discussion elsewhere. It's still the only supported Wordpress backend, which means it's the defacto web service backend for a large portion of the Internet. It's hard for more advanced users to find anything interesting and new about it.

morgo 10y ago

lots of things happening in the MySQL world: - a couple of weeks ago we released a document store (new protocol + connectors) based on protobufs - last year 5.7 was released. Many new features, I have a list here: http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com http://www.thecompletelistoffeatures.com

dorfsmay 10y ago

Your perception of PostgreSQL being obscure in comparison to MySQL is interesting... Most projects I've worked on use pg. My perception is that projects using MySQL do so because of history (project started in php and that was the default stack, it was faster at the time (before transactions), etc...).

wolf550e 10y ago

MySQL is the PHP of relational databases. You can do most things with it, but you don't choose it when you have the option to choose something better.

combatentropy 10y ago

> why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL You'll see the same phenomenon on Slashdot. MySQL is popular among a subset of programmers: web developers. In corporations, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are more popular. Further, MySQL is popular among a subset of web developers: those who use PHP. Among web developers who use Python, Postgres seems more popular. My suspicion is that MySQL's popularity is tied to those web-hosting plans (1 GB of storage! 1 TB of bandwidth! 10 databases! $10/month!). They were almost always MySQL databases. Web hosts that offered Postgres databases were few and far between. This article corroborates my theory: http://rodner.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-makes-mysql-so-popular.html http://rodner.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-makes-mysql-so-popul.... MySQL's company (which at the time was "MySQL" not Oracle) pushed it in at a critical time in the development of the web. I have written applications that use: Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle. My favorite by far is Postgres. The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

brisance 10y ago
>>The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse. A lot of decisions are made holistically instead of a "purely technical standpoint". In large companies where there are still IT departments (e.g. use of Active Directory), MS is still very much the de facto platform, and SQL Server is the "logical" choice.
tomc1985 10y ago
While I love me some PG, SQL Server is nothing to sneeze at. Was fairly impressed with it, never had any serious issues on an under-specced server once occupied by terrible programmers
manigandham 10y ago
> Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse. Based on what? Both commercial databases have incredible features, tooling and extensions that leave postgres behind. Postgres today doesn't even have a solid scale-up or scale-out strategy. It does have nice SQL support and makes developer lives a little easier but this isnt anywhere close to making it the absolute winner technically.

chris_wot 10y ago

Postgres is hardly obscure.