The question of MySQL's popularity comes up often in HN Postgres threads. The answers naturally skew towards being a bit one-sided, as most people clicking on a

The question of MySQL's popularity comes up often in HN Postgres threads. The answers naturally skew towards being a bit one-sided, as most people clicking on a Postgres article tend to be Postgres users currently (and sometimes former MySQL users in years past). This can result in comparisons of modern-day Postgres to 5+ year old versions of MySQL. That said, and with a disclaimer that my own bias leans the other way (as I have a lot more MySQL experience than Postgres experience) although I try to be impartial about these things: * Spanner: I've heard this second-hand and might be incorrect, but as I understand it, Google's original internal MySQL team was shuttered in ~2009 and some of those folks may have transferred over to the Spanner team. I wouldn't say that Spanner is particularly based off of MySQL anyway though, but I don't have enough familiarity to say that conclusively. * Aurora: AWS now offers a Postgres-based Aurora as well. As for why the built the MySQL one first, I'd assume that was likely a business decision based on mysql-vs-postgres RDS usage at the time. * Those two aside, there are definitely major products based around Postgres. AWS Redshift is one example. Or look at CockroachDB, which chose wire-protocol compatibility with Postgres. (There are some examples the other way too; e.g. TiDB, which chose wire-protocol compatibility with MySQL). * Regarding why MySQL has historically been popular, there are a lot of factors. I'd say the biggest one for large users has been replication; some of my older HN comments delve into that more, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16880663 for one example. For smaller users, ease-of-use has been important. The other discussions in this thread hint at this, especially around silly simple things like the "exit" command.