It goes to show you how important a few critical features (buzz, easy installation, performance) can be to early uptake, and it snowballs from there. From my p

It goes to show you how important a few critical features (buzz, easy installation, performance) can be to early uptake, and it snowballs from there. From my perspective, there has been absolutely no reason to choose MySQL over Postgres if you want a DB for a long time now. If you just wanted a fast data store with replication and without the ACID features, you probably really wanted Berkeley DB over MySQL. The reason this is an interesting study is because MySQL has been so popular for so long. They did the right things at the right time to become popular. And the timing WAS perfect; an easy to use and install database in 1999 when before the .com bubble burst, when so many people (like me) were using a database for the first time and didn't know the first thing about RDBM's.