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The reason I think a single database release has a dramatic effect on the entire SQL ecosystem is simple: MySQL is the weakest link in the chain. That's a heck

The reason I think a single database release has a dramatic effect on the entire SQL ecosystem is simple: MySQL is the weakest link in the chain. That's a heckuva deep cut. I wonder why/how MySQL got so popular, when in my head the go-to is Postgres (perhaps because I worked on Django/Rails stuff early on). Is it because of Oracle and their marketing/sales work?

masklinn 8y ago
> I wonder why/how MySQL got so popular, when in my head the go-to is Postgres (perhaps because I worked on Django/Rails stuff early on). Is it because of Oracle and their marketing/sales work? MySQL's popularity long predates the Oracle acquisition. MySQL got popular because it was usually available (alongside PHP) on shared hosting and had very fast read performances (using the default MyISAM storage, at the cost of write performances or actually caring about your data). What with the web being front-loaded on read, that made it a pretty good fit. Meanwhile historically postgres was byzantine to set up and slow. It cared much more for your data and had plenty of features (custom types! procedural languages! transactional DDL!), but it didn't really work OOTB (still doesn't, IIRC the base configuration still assumes rotating rust and 128MB RAM or some shit) and wasn't available on most hosting platforms, especially not the really cheap shared hosts. Also while Django defaulted to postgres, I'm pretty sure Rails used to kinda-sorta default to mysql (I'm talking 10 years back, many plugins/extensions didn't work properly on pg).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- TurningCanadian 8y ago
  MySQL makes some of the same assumptions about memory. You have to tune it if you want optimal performance. https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/05/03/best-practices-for-configuring-optimal-mysql-memory-usage/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/05/03/best-practices-for-c...
- misterbowfinger 8y ago
  Makes sense, thanks for the thorough answer! The popularity of the LAMP stack predates me a bit, so I didn't know as much about the history.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eire1130 8y ago
It was prior to the Oracle purchase, I believe. MySQL was the M in the LAMP stack, and was installed on many linux distros by default.
thereau 8y ago
MySQL was popular before Oracle aquired them
brockhaywood 8y ago
For a heck of a long time, well before Oracle owning it, Mysql was the defacto standard for building web apps. Remember the LAMP days? I'd wager it wasn't until early-ish in this decade that Postgres became the goto for web apps etc.
nemothekid 8y ago
My memory might be a bit fuzzy (I was only in my teens when LAMP stack was popular), but I remember a lot of hosts didn't have postgres support built into their PHP distribution at first. If you were using shared hosting, it was a given you'd have MySql support, but maybe not Postgres.
teilo 8y ago
No, it's been that way long before Oracle took over. It's because the two projects had different starting goals, and thus attracted different audiences. MySQL was designed to be small and fast, while sacrificing consistency and integrity. Postgres was intended as an enterprise class DB from day one, with the expected robustness, integrity, and feature set. It led MySQL on features for many years, but lagged on speed. During the .COM boom of the 90's, the flurry of startups cared more about speed and ease-of-use, and were willing to sacrifice consistency. Thus it became the default choice for most open-source projects and web development. Because of this, a whole ecosystem of support and tooling developed around MySQL, which reinforced the industry trend. As to performance, Postgres has long since bridged that gap. As to ease of setup/config - Postgres was never difficult in the first place. The perceived complexity was due to its more robust feature set and security model. There was certainly more to learn, but honestly, it was never so terribly difficult as some people then and now seem to view it.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Web startups typically didn't care that much if they lost say 1 out of every 10,000 transactions if that sacrifice kept them cheap and nimble. Since they usually didn't charge customers, losing 1 out of 10,000 is not that big of a deal. Of course, if a bank did that they'd be sued up the wazoo, and that's why transactional integrity and "big iron" database features matter to banks.
overcast 8y ago
If anything, Oracle's "marketing" is destroying MySQL's popularity. Oracle is where software goes to die in my opinion. Their suite of software is the biggest rats nest of convoluted crap I've ever dealt with. So glad I'm off that team in my organization.
mmsimanga 8y ago
To add to other replies. For a long time, Postgres did not run on Windows which was and is the dominant OS. This was the days before affordable VPS were available for you to spin up a server. You developed your site on your laptop and FTP's it to hosting provider. Edit: Added more context
kentosi 8y ago
I think that the main reason for a long time was (a) being able to install mysql quickly, and (b) having a decent SQL UI, which was MySqlWorkbench. Things might have changed now for Postgres.
- ExactoKnight 8y ago
  The thing is, features like Postgres' native UUID column types, JSONB and HStore are killer features that give developers data flexibility they didn't use to have before, meaning with one database I can go between relational or MongoDB-style JSON dumping where needed. This, plus strong consistency to prevent shooting yourself in the foot, is valuable for 99% of use cases where you don't need insane web scale.
smacktoward 8y ago
Back in the day (i.e. long before Oracle purchased MySQL), if you wanted an open source database, you had two choices: Postgres, which was reliable, and MySQL, which was fast. It turned out there were a lot more people who cared about being fast than there were who cared about reliability. Eventually Postgres got fast enough and MySQL got reliable enough, which has made the distinction between them somewhat fuzzier today. But by then MySQL had become the standard database offered by umpty zillion web hosts, and ubiquity is a hard position to dislodge someone from.
- VectorLock 8y ago
  >Postgres, which was reliable My experience recently and historically has been the exact opposite. Postgres seems to blow up in more mysterious and hair-yankingly frustrating ways than MySQL does. "Why Uber Engineering moved from Postgres to MySQL" echos a lot of the issues I've had with Postgres in large production environments.
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    Uber’s use of PostgreSQL was a mess. It’s probably the worst example of why not to use PostgreSQL.
- ausjke 8y ago
  https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/ https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/ PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise this is very scary, if not fatally scary.
  - sterwill 8y ago
    I can't read it because it's paywalled, but how is the operating system's fsync behavior "fatally scary" with regards to PostgreSQL? How does MySQL handle durability in these cases? What's your point?
    - severine 8y ago
      https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/752063/5a5e2ebd8bcf3129/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/752063/5a5e2ebd8bcf3129/
nabla9 8y ago
MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. It provided fast relational SQL database for the early web application stack without any concern of maintaining ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) that "real" databases like Postgres providied. It had slight speed advantage and that was enough to turn the scale against Postgres. MySQL was demonstration of Worse Is Better in the database world. https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  > MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. Yep, over and over again, "worse is better" proves itself as the all-important software mantra. Get that flimsy "database" out the door and loop back around to fix the "eats data" bugs 5+ years later. The key to adoption seems to be to pinpoint something that people really want ("super fast 'SQL database' that I can run virtually for free" c. 1999), rush out a one-fifth-working version of the headliner features and pretend like it's all well and good, and then work to spread that solution as widely as possible. Once you get the momentum, it's impossible to stop, and someone like Sun swings by to ask if you'd mind taking a billion dollars off their hands. I don't think there's really a credible argument that technical merit has anything to do with success or adoption anymore (beyond just "superficially appears to work"). MySQL is a good specimen, but JavaScript is the real poster boy for the indisputable triumph of "worse is better".
  - goatlover 8y ago
    > but JavaScript is the real poster boy for the indisputable triumph of "worse is better". Not sure it beats PHP in being worse. But at least both got substantially better with recent versions.
- gaius 8y ago
  MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. The MS-DOS of databases
williamxd3 8y ago
cause PHP
mathnode 8y ago
My 2 cents from the trenches back in 2004 and the LAMP stacks boomed; replication. It’s really really super simple. And the binlog format is open! The commercial and open source options at the time, were painful to scale. Go ask an amazon engineer about their old 3 oracle mirrors and cdn-like Berkeley db distribution over a beer or two.
jaequery 8y ago
It's probably all because of PHP. Over 90% of PHP apps were built on Mysql (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla). And you know, WP alone powers like half the websites on the internet. Sad reality.
- ExactoKnight 8y ago
  This statistic is mentioned a lot, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown by amount of traffic on those sites. In these metrics thanks to the big web companies, the reach of Wordpress is much lower and other application frameworks are more predominant.
darrenf 8y ago
My recollection is that MySQL got popular because it was the cool and hip and free replacement for mSQL. Certainly I recall migrating from the latter to the former in 97 or so. Postgres at the time had only just started supporting SQL and was much harder to install, administer or understand than either (for me at least!)
xutopia 8y ago
MySQL was actually really easy to install when Posgresql wasn't. MySQL was also much faster when it supported less SQL features. Neither of those things are really true anymore and Posgres has been my go to DB for a while now.
- gns24 8y ago
  Yup. The early MySQL developers spent a lot of time and effort making the install and setup process as fast and smooth as possible; a lot of people stuck with what they could get working first.

masklinn 8y ago

> I wonder why/how MySQL got so popular, when in my head the go-to is Postgres (perhaps because I worked on Django/Rails stuff early on). Is it because of Oracle and their marketing/sales work? MySQL's popularity long predates the Oracle acquisition. MySQL got popular because it was usually available (alongside PHP) on shared hosting and had very fast read performances (using the default MyISAM storage, at the cost of write performances or actually caring about your data). What with the web being front-loaded on read, that made it a pretty good fit. Meanwhile historically postgres was byzantine to set up and slow. It cared much more for your data and had plenty of features (custom types! procedural languages! transactional DDL!), but it didn't really work OOTB (still doesn't, IIRC the base configuration still assumes rotating rust and 128MB RAM or some shit) and wasn't available on most hosting platforms, especially not the really cheap shared hosts. Also while Django defaulted to postgres, I'm pretty sure Rails used to kinda-sorta default to mysql (I'm talking 10 years back, many plugins/extensions didn't work properly on pg).

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TurningCanadian 8y ago
MySQL makes some of the same assumptions about memory. You have to tune it if you want optimal performance. https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/05/03/best-practices-for-configuring-optimal-mysql-memory-usage/ https://www.percona.com/blog/2016/05/03/best-practices-for-c...
misterbowfinger 8y ago
Makes sense, thanks for the thorough answer! The popularity of the LAMP stack predates me a bit, so I didn't know as much about the history.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eire1130 8y ago

It was prior to the Oracle purchase, I believe. MySQL was the M in the LAMP stack, and was installed on many linux distros by default.

thereau 8y ago

MySQL was popular before Oracle aquired them

brockhaywood 8y ago

For a heck of a long time, well before Oracle owning it, Mysql was the defacto standard for building web apps. Remember the LAMP days? I'd wager it wasn't until early-ish in this decade that Postgres became the goto for web apps etc.

nemothekid 8y ago

My memory might be a bit fuzzy (I was only in my teens when LAMP stack was popular), but I remember a lot of hosts didn't have postgres support built into their PHP distribution at first. If you were using shared hosting, it was a given you'd have MySql support, but maybe not Postgres.

teilo 8y ago

No, it's been that way long before Oracle took over. It's because the two projects had different starting goals, and thus attracted different audiences. MySQL was designed to be small and fast, while sacrificing consistency and integrity. Postgres was intended as an enterprise class DB from day one, with the expected robustness, integrity, and feature set. It led MySQL on features for many years, but lagged on speed. During the .COM boom of the 90's, the flurry of startups cared more about speed and ease-of-use, and were willing to sacrifice consistency. Thus it became the default choice for most open-source projects and web development. Because of this, a whole ecosystem of support and tooling developed around MySQL, which reinforced the industry trend. As to performance, Postgres has long since bridged that gap. As to ease of setup/config - Postgres was never difficult in the first place. The perceived complexity was due to its more robust feature set and security model. There was certainly more to learn, but honestly, it was never so terribly difficult as some people then and now seem to view it.

tabtab 8y ago
Web startups typically didn't care that much if they lost say 1 out of every 10,000 transactions if that sacrifice kept them cheap and nimble. Since they usually didn't charge customers, losing 1 out of 10,000 is not that big of a deal. Of course, if a bank did that they'd be sued up the wazoo, and that's why transactional integrity and "big iron" database features matter to banks.

overcast 8y ago

If anything, Oracle's "marketing" is destroying MySQL's popularity. Oracle is where software goes to die in my opinion. Their suite of software is the biggest rats nest of convoluted crap I've ever dealt with. So glad I'm off that team in my organization.

mmsimanga 8y ago

To add to other replies. For a long time, Postgres did not run on Windows which was and is the dominant OS. This was the days before affordable VPS were available for you to spin up a server. You developed your site on your laptop and FTP's it to hosting provider. Edit: Added more context

kentosi 8y ago

I think that the main reason for a long time was (a) being able to install mysql quickly, and (b) having a decent SQL UI, which was MySqlWorkbench. Things might have changed now for Postgres.

ExactoKnight 8y ago
The thing is, features like Postgres' native UUID column types, JSONB and HStore are killer features that give developers data flexibility they didn't use to have before, meaning with one database I can go between relational or MongoDB-style JSON dumping where needed. This, plus strong consistency to prevent shooting yourself in the foot, is valuable for 99% of use cases where you don't need insane web scale.

smacktoward 8y ago

Back in the day (i.e. long before Oracle purchased MySQL), if you wanted an open source database, you had two choices: Postgres, which was reliable, and MySQL, which was fast. It turned out there were a lot more people who cared about being fast than there were who cared about reliability. Eventually Postgres got fast enough and MySQL got reliable enough, which has made the distinction between them somewhat fuzzier today. But by then MySQL had become the standard database offered by umpty zillion web hosts, and ubiquity is a hard position to dislodge someone from.

VectorLock 8y ago
>Postgres, which was reliable My experience recently and historically has been the exact opposite. Postgres seems to blow up in more mysterious and hair-yankingly frustrating ways than MySQL does. "Why Uber Engineering moved from Postgres to MySQL" echos a lot of the issues I've had with Postgres in large production environments.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  Uber’s use of PostgreSQL was a mess. It’s probably the worst example of why not to use PostgreSQL.
ausjke 8y ago
https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/ https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/ PostgreSQL's fsync() surprise this is very scary, if not fatally scary.
- sterwill 8y ago
  I can't read it because it's paywalled, but how is the operating system's fsync behavior "fatally scary" with regards to PostgreSQL? How does MySQL handle durability in these cases? What's your point?
  - severine 8y ago
    https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/752063/5a5e2ebd8bcf3129/ https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/752063/5a5e2ebd8bcf3129/

nabla9 8y ago

MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. It provided fast relational SQL database for the early web application stack without any concern of maintaining ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) that "real" databases like Postgres providied. It had slight speed advantage and that was enough to turn the scale against Postgres. MySQL was demonstration of Worse Is Better in the database world. https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

cookiecaper 8y ago
> MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. Yep, over and over again, "worse is better" proves itself as the all-important software mantra. Get that flimsy "database" out the door and loop back around to fix the "eats data" bugs 5+ years later. The key to adoption seems to be to pinpoint something that people really want ("super fast 'SQL database' that I can run virtually for free" c. 1999), rush out a one-fifth-working version of the headliner features and pretend like it's all well and good, and then work to spread that solution as widely as possible. Once you get the momentum, it's impossible to stop, and someone like Sun swings by to ask if you'd mind taking a billion dollars off their hands. I don't think there's really a credible argument that technical merit has anything to do with success or adoption anymore (beyond just "superficially appears to work"). MySQL is a good specimen, but JavaScript is the real poster boy for the indisputable triumph of "worse is better".
- goatlover 8y ago
  > but JavaScript is the real poster boy for the indisputable triumph of "worse is better". Not sure it beats PHP in being worse. But at least both got substantially better with recent versions.
gaius 8y ago
MySQL became popular because it was quick and dirty. The MS-DOS of databases

williamxd3 8y ago

cause PHP

mathnode 8y ago

My 2 cents from the trenches back in 2004 and the LAMP stacks boomed; replication. It’s really really super simple. And the binlog format is open! The commercial and open source options at the time, were painful to scale. Go ask an amazon engineer about their old 3 oracle mirrors and cdn-like Berkeley db distribution over a beer or two.

jaequery 8y ago

It's probably all because of PHP. Over 90% of PHP apps were built on Mysql (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla). And you know, WP alone powers like half the websites on the internet. Sad reality.

ExactoKnight 8y ago
This statistic is mentioned a lot, but it would be interesting to see a breakdown by amount of traffic on those sites. In these metrics thanks to the big web companies, the reach of Wordpress is much lower and other application frameworks are more predominant.

darrenf 8y ago

My recollection is that MySQL got popular because it was the cool and hip and free replacement for mSQL. Certainly I recall migrating from the latter to the former in 97 or so. Postgres at the time had only just started supporting SQL and was much harder to install, administer or understand than either (for me at least!)

xutopia 8y ago

MySQL was actually really easy to install when Posgresql wasn't. MySQL was also much faster when it supported less SQL features. Neither of those things are really true anymore and Posgres has been my go to DB for a while now.

gns24 8y ago
Yup. The early MySQL developers spent a lot of time and effort making the install and setup process as fast and smooth as possible; a lot of people stuck with what they could get working first.