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Back in 1997, my decision between postgres and MySQL was made for me by the fact that Postgres was pretty much impossible to install on my Windows box, while My

by seldo 16y ago

Back in 1997, my decision between postgres and MySQL was made for me by the fact that Postgres was pretty much impossible to install on my Windows box, while MySQL had a sexy InstallShield. When you are trying to make your technology attractive to a broad base, it's important to remember that newbie developers will always take the simplest path, and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. If your software is not very, very Windows-friendly, you will lose first-timers to technologies that are. This was also one of the big, big factors in PHP's success. Obviously, running a website or a database on Windows is a bad idea, but you need to learn how to code before you need to learn that fact.

teilo 16y ago
Respectfully, I really don't think the Windows factor had much to do with it. It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow. Further, MySQL was easier to setup due to its simplistic security model, and thus there was less to learn.
- davidw 16y ago
  > It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow. I've always said that Mysql (with MyISAM rather than InnoDB, to be fair) was like a bicycle without brakes. Yes, it's faster going down hills, however...
  - lsc 16y ago
    but that was, I think, what those who criticized MySQL missed. 95% of the use I saw MySQL being put to in the late 90s and early 00s would today be done in some distributed key/value store. Most people using MySQL didn't care that it wasn't a very good RDBMS because they didn't need a very good RDBMS. they needed a fast key/value store that could handle basic locking most of the time, and that worked out of box without a lot of setup.
  - 8ren 16y ago
    Markets weight features. Sometimes performance is most important, sometimes scalability, adoptability, usability, reliability, cost etc. It can even change over time. This is self-evident, but it's so easy to forget when one is familiar with the overall comparative technical merits - this one is so much better in most ways. How could the other one win?!
mml 16y ago
i'm 100% sure that postgresql's goal was not to "make [their] technology attractive to a broad base". it was to create the best free rdbms they could.
- kjksf 16y ago
  The assumption is that those are mutually exclusive. I've been watching PostgreSQL development back in the days and to me it's clear that the biggest mistake PostgreSQL made was not responding to market demands as quickly as MySQL did. Windows support, built-in replication, built-in full-text search - those are all things that MySQL added much sooner than PostgreSQL. Those are also the features that people cared about and a big part why they were choosing MySQL over psql. At some point early lead turned into crushing defeat in terms of market and mind share. You can claim that some other features constitute "best free rdbms" but clearly PostgreSQL team does think that those are included in that definition since eventually they added all of them. The problem is that they did it long after MySQL had them. Too little, too late. The sad part is that it wasn't always a matter of coding but a matter of bad priorities and bad marketing (where I include defining what the product is and isn't as a fundamental part of marketing). For example, I believe psql had high-quality full-text search coded before MySQL did but the core team resisted shipping it by default. Instead for a long time a super valuable feature was part of "contrib" package i.e. you had to jump through hoops (like compiling it yourself) to get it to work. The main reason why PostgreSQL failed to MySQL was that the project was driven by extremely bright coders but terrible marketers.
  - blibble 16y ago
    Remember that PostgreSQL isn't run by a commercial enterprise, it's written by volunteers who as a general group couldn't care less about marketing, market share or what your business wants. For an rather more extreme example of this see OpenBSD, who basically say "if you want to use it go right ahead, but we build OpenBSD for our own use, not for your use."
wazoox 16y ago
> and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. According to reddit statistics, this is no longer the case (68% only). And back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead.
- pan69 16y ago
  Hmmm. That's like getting browser stats from w3schools.com. And back in 2000, I knew absolutely nobody on a Mac, zero.
- teilo 16y ago
  >back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead. Either you had a very eclectic group of friends, or your memory is slipping a bit. The big in-rush of web developers to the Mac platform did not take place until Macs became Unix machines. Back in 2000, there was no such thing as OS X, unless you count the public beta. 10.0 suffered from abysmal adoption. I don't know any developers who used Puma, much less Cheetah. Most of us were using various Linux distros. However, by somewhere around 2003ish, with Jaguar, the switch had begun in earnest, but Mac's didn't predominate among web developers for a while longer.

by seldo 16y ago

teilo 16y ago

Respectfully, I really don't think the Windows factor had much to do with it. It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow. Further, MySQL was easier to setup due to its simplistic security model, and thus there was less to learn.

davidw 16y ago
> It came down to one thing: the perception that MySQL was fast and Postgres was slow. I've always said that Mysql (with MyISAM rather than InnoDB, to be fair) was like a bicycle without brakes. Yes, it's faster going down hills, however...
- lsc 16y ago
  but that was, I think, what those who criticized MySQL missed. 95% of the use I saw MySQL being put to in the late 90s and early 00s would today be done in some distributed key/value store. Most people using MySQL didn't care that it wasn't a very good RDBMS because they didn't need a very good RDBMS. they needed a fast key/value store that could handle basic locking most of the time, and that worked out of box without a lot of setup.
- 8ren 16y ago
  Markets weight features. Sometimes performance is most important, sometimes scalability, adoptability, usability, reliability, cost etc. It can even change over time. This is self-evident, but it's so easy to forget when one is familiar with the overall comparative technical merits - this one is so much better in most ways. How could the other one win?!

mml 16y ago

i'm 100% sure that postgresql's goal was not to "make [their] technology attractive to a broad base". it was to create the best free rdbms they could.

kjksf 16y ago
The assumption is that those are mutually exclusive. I've been watching PostgreSQL development back in the days and to me it's clear that the biggest mistake PostgreSQL made was not responding to market demands as quickly as MySQL did. Windows support, built-in replication, built-in full-text search - those are all things that MySQL added much sooner than PostgreSQL. Those are also the features that people cared about and a big part why they were choosing MySQL over psql. At some point early lead turned into crushing defeat in terms of market and mind share. You can claim that some other features constitute "best free rdbms" but clearly PostgreSQL team does think that those are included in that definition since eventually they added all of them. The problem is that they did it long after MySQL had them. Too little, too late. The sad part is that it wasn't always a matter of coding but a matter of bad priorities and bad marketing (where I include defining what the product is and isn't as a fundamental part of marketing). For example, I believe psql had high-quality full-text search coded before MySQL did but the core team resisted shipping it by default. Instead for a long time a super valuable feature was part of "contrib" package i.e. you had to jump through hoops (like compiling it yourself) to get it to work. The main reason why PostgreSQL failed to MySQL was that the project was driven by extremely bright coders but terrible marketers.
- blibble 16y ago
  Remember that PostgreSQL isn't run by a commercial enterprise, it's written by volunteers who as a general group couldn't care less about marketing, market share or what your business wants. For an rather more extreme example of this see OpenBSD, who basically say "if you want to use it go right ahead, but we build OpenBSD for our own use, not for your use."

wazoox 16y ago

> and that 95% of all computers are Windows boxes. According to reddit statistics, this is no longer the case (68% only). And back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead.

pan69 16y ago
Hmmm. That's like getting browser stats from w3schools.com. And back in 2000, I knew absolutely nobody on a Mac, zero.
teilo 16y ago
>back in 2000, I knew almost nobody in the web dev business using windows, but Macs instead. Either you had a very eclectic group of friends, or your memory is slipping a bit. The big in-rush of web developers to the Mac platform did not take place until Macs became Unix machines. Back in 2000, there was no such thing as OS X, unless you count the public beta. 10.0 suffered from abysmal adoption. I don't know any developers who used Puma, much less Cheetah. Most of us were using various Linux distros. However, by somewhere around 2003ish, with Jaguar, the switch had begun in earnest, but Mac's didn't predominate among web developers for a while longer.