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

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.