DB marketing is an interesting case. It's easier to market on features that devs want, which is what Mongo did. Your serious users (DE w/ years of experience)

DB marketing is an interesting case. It's easier to market on features that devs want, which is what Mongo did. Your serious users (DE w/ years of experience) are more into the reliability and guarantees, the building of which tends to slow down feature launches. (Or, sometimes, the features developers want conflicts with more "Traditional" db systems). One thing I've rarely seen mentioned, but I believe is a force behind MySQL's success: metadata manipulation. DESCRIBE TABLE, SHOW CREATE TABLE,... stuff ends up being a lot more useful than I would think as an outsider. Going from MySQL to pgsql was a steep learning curve because the commands to display table listings (\dt; i think) felt very arcane. Also, being able to rename, add, remove columns. Finally, can I create a table with the same schema (data optional) as another table? I do that a lot.