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MariaDB is a fork of MySQL... which already had its heyday when Postgres was more immature. I've been using Postgres since 7.x (early 2000s) and everyone loved

MariaDB is a fork of MySQL... which already had its heyday when Postgres was more immature. I've been using Postgres since 7.x (early 2000s) and everyone loved MySQL back then. In fact, the late 90s up to maybe 5-6 years ago, MySQL got more attention than postgres.. that's a long time for any software package. There are a lot of reasons for MySQL sort of losing its position -- from the Oracle takeover, to the fork, to the various compromises that were made early on (that Postgres didn't make)... and together + Postgres continuing to make steady progress during that time, has put Postgres in the lead.

zeveb 9y ago
I don't believe there was ever a time when Postgres was more immature than MySQL. There was a time when hype-driven development was immature enough to prefer MySQL, with its silent data loss & data corruption issues, over Postgres. This was, IIRC, mostly due to performance. It turns out, though, that once one configures MySQL not to lose & corrupt data, it's slower than Postgres. Honestly, Postgres has always been in the lead — it's just that as folks have gained experience, they've discovered that they want a stable, reliable, fast database.
- rgbrenner 9y ago
  when hype-driven development was immature enough to prefer MySQL I don't think that's an accurate description. In the 90s computers were _a lot_ slower.. and having the option of putting up with a few warts in exchange for increased performance was a significant advantage over postgres. That early advantage gave them a much larger ecosystem - apps that required MySQL, developers that were familiar with it, etc. It took years for that early advantage to be overcome by postgres.. both by improving Postgres performance, and as computers became faster people were less willing to make the compromises that MySQL provided. I think it's worth acknowledging MySQL's early advantages, and not pretending 15 years of popularity was somehow because people were "immature".
  - timc3 9y ago
    I think MySQL's advantage was that it was installed on some many hosting companies servers (along with PHP) that it became ubiquitous for many. Most DB admins that I knew could see no clear advantage of MySQL when we looked at the details apart from for failover and multi-host uptime has an easier deployment. Disclaimer I have been using PostgreSQL for perhaps 20 years now.
    - rgbrenner 9y ago
      That's the ecosystem that developed because of MySQL's early performance advantage... that wasn't until later on. The performance issue is actually a core part of MySQL's history. We have to go way back to the early 90s. Back then Postgres didn't use SQL. There was a project called mSQL that created an SQL layer on top of Postgres... but it didn't perform very well on the slow computers of the early 90s. So mSQL created it's own lightweight DBMS to replace Postgres. mSQL was popular in the mid-90s, and it's performance started the creation of that early ecosystem that you're referring to. Later MySQL took mSQL and added more features, had a more liberal/cheaper license, and kept the mSQL API.. and that ecosystem that developed around mSQL continued with MySQL. So the performance advantage that gave MySQL it's lead, began pre-Postgres95 (that added SQL to postgres), that created the ecosystem that kept MySQL popular. When MySQL passed mSQL in popularity in 1997, Postgre95 was a little over a year old, and was just recently renamed to PostgreSQL (while mSQL was about 3 years old at the time). If Postgres was more performant, mSQL would have been based on it, and MySQL probably would have never existed. Instead, by the time Postgres addressed the SQL issue, they were 2 years late, and by the time they addressed the performance issue, they were a few more years late (by the early 00s, IIRC the performance was comparable).. and by then MySQL had cemented its lead in the market.
      - justinclift 9y ago
        Keep in mind that the "performance advantage" MySQL supposedly "had" over PostgreSQL mostly came down to a bad default setting in PG. Back in early PG versions (7.x from memory), the default shared buffers setting value was extremely low, in order to allow PG to "just work" even on very low memory systems. (8MB?) The effect of not changing that from the default was PG then pegging the cpu at 100% (moving stuff into and out of the tiny buffer) with terrible performance. When we raised that default to something reasonable for (at the time) modern systems... our performance magically increased substantially from the perspective of many non-DBAs. Note - The exact details are in the PG email archives if anyone cares enough to look. :)
- mjw1007 9y ago
  Around 2001 Postgres was more reliable than MySQL and more advanced in many ways, but it did have some odd omissions which made it fair to describe it as immature. For example if you wanted to drop a column you had to create a new table and rename it over the old one.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]

zeveb 9y ago

I don't believe there was ever a time when Postgres was more immature than MySQL. There was a time when hype-driven development was immature enough to prefer MySQL, with its silent data loss & data corruption issues, over Postgres. This was, IIRC, mostly due to performance. It turns out, though, that once one configures MySQL not to lose & corrupt data, it's slower than Postgres. Honestly, Postgres has always been in the lead — it's just that as folks have gained experience, they've discovered that they want a stable, reliable, fast database.

rgbrenner 9y ago
when hype-driven development was immature enough to prefer MySQL I don't think that's an accurate description. In the 90s computers were _a lot_ slower.. and having the option of putting up with a few warts in exchange for increased performance was a significant advantage over postgres. That early advantage gave them a much larger ecosystem - apps that required MySQL, developers that were familiar with it, etc. It took years for that early advantage to be overcome by postgres.. both by improving Postgres performance, and as computers became faster people were less willing to make the compromises that MySQL provided. I think it's worth acknowledging MySQL's early advantages, and not pretending 15 years of popularity was somehow because people were "immature".
- timc3 9y ago
  I think MySQL's advantage was that it was installed on some many hosting companies servers (along with PHP) that it became ubiquitous for many. Most DB admins that I knew could see no clear advantage of MySQL when we looked at the details apart from for failover and multi-host uptime has an easier deployment. Disclaimer I have been using PostgreSQL for perhaps 20 years now.
  - rgbrenner 9y ago
    That's the ecosystem that developed because of MySQL's early performance advantage... that wasn't until later on. The performance issue is actually a core part of MySQL's history. We have to go way back to the early 90s. Back then Postgres didn't use SQL. There was a project called mSQL that created an SQL layer on top of Postgres... but it didn't perform very well on the slow computers of the early 90s. So mSQL created it's own lightweight DBMS to replace Postgres. mSQL was popular in the mid-90s, and it's performance started the creation of that early ecosystem that you're referring to. Later MySQL took mSQL and added more features, had a more liberal/cheaper license, and kept the mSQL API.. and that ecosystem that developed around mSQL continued with MySQL. So the performance advantage that gave MySQL it's lead, began pre-Postgres95 (that added SQL to postgres), that created the ecosystem that kept MySQL popular. When MySQL passed mSQL in popularity in 1997, Postgre95 was a little over a year old, and was just recently renamed to PostgreSQL (while mSQL was about 3 years old at the time). If Postgres was more performant, mSQL would have been based on it, and MySQL probably would have never existed. Instead, by the time Postgres addressed the SQL issue, they were 2 years late, and by the time they addressed the performance issue, they were a few more years late (by the early 00s, IIRC the performance was comparable).. and by then MySQL had cemented its lead in the market.
    - justinclift 9y ago
      Keep in mind that the "performance advantage" MySQL supposedly "had" over PostgreSQL mostly came down to a bad default setting in PG. Back in early PG versions (7.x from memory), the default shared buffers setting value was extremely low, in order to allow PG to "just work" even on very low memory systems. (8MB?) The effect of not changing that from the default was PG then pegging the cpu at 100% (moving stuff into and out of the tiny buffer) with terrible performance. When we raised that default to something reasonable for (at the time) modern systems... our performance magically increased substantially from the perspective of many non-DBAs. Note - The exact details are in the PG email archives if anyone cares enough to look. :)
mjw1007 9y ago
Around 2001 Postgres was more reliable than MySQL and more advanced in many ways, but it did have some odd omissions which made it fair to describe it as immature. For example if you wanted to drop a column you had to create a new table and rename it over the old one.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]