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I've noticed recently that Postgres is really gaining in popularity, especially as a MySQL alternative. Why is that? Is it because of Oracle's involvement in My

by jjice 7y ago

I've noticed recently that Postgres is really gaining in popularity, especially as a MySQL alternative. Why is that? Is it because of Oracle's involvement in MySQL or has Postgres really improved in performance?

sosodev 7y ago
I tend to reach for postgres on all of my projects just because it’s the simplest option. It’s ridiculously easy to get running (you can just start the docker container), every framework seems to support it by default, and its types and query syntax just seem a little more intuitive than all the others. I can’t speak to performance since I don’t have anything particularly intense running on it.
goatinaboat 7y ago
Postgres really improved in performance? It’s not the only reason but yes, Postgres has recently made significant advances in parallelism and indexing.
kjeetgill 7y ago
Postgres has earned the reputation for doing thinking features through, rolling improvements out reliably, and is pretty committed to doing things right (tm). This has meant fewer/slower hot features in the past, but solid when they arrive. It feels like they've pulled ahead in many features now. My favorite is all the indexing options. It may be undeserved now, but MySQL had/has a reputation for a lot of sloppy work for good enough features or for performance. Mysql dropped MyISAM for InnoDB in an effort to undo some of that damage so it's hard for me to say they're not committed to quality now. But reputations take time to rebuild.
barrkel 7y ago
PostgreSQL is way more featureful than MySQL, and the recent parallelization optimizations do add a significant competitive advantage over MySQL. What kept MySQL in the popularity lead for so long, though, was its solid async replication story. It wasn't until fairly recently that Postgres had that natively, rather than by third parties.
dano 7y ago
I think the larger programming community is coming around to the stability and good engineering present in the Postgresql development team and code base. Over the past decade we've seen a lot of different data storage options presented that have exchanged critical data integrity features for speed, architecture, "document storage", or some other fad factor of the day. I've been using Postgresql in a production environment since 2004, having converted from MySQL and never looked back. I'm not bagging on the other technologies, they're great for certain tasks, its just that Postgresql is great data storage and query engine and I think you'll grow to love it. I recommend the #postgresql community on Freenode as they are helpful and generous with their time. Someone on HN once said "Postgres is the answer until proven otherwise" and that's a pretty good sentiment.

by jjice 7y ago

sosodev 7y ago

I tend to reach for postgres on all of my projects just because it’s the simplest option. It’s ridiculously easy to get running (you can just start the docker container), every framework seems to support it by default, and its types and query syntax just seem a little more intuitive than all the others. I can’t speak to performance since I don’t have anything particularly intense running on it.

goatinaboat 7y ago

Postgres really improved in performance? It’s not the only reason but yes, Postgres has recently made significant advances in parallelism and indexing.

kjeetgill 7y ago

Postgres has earned the reputation for doing thinking features through, rolling improvements out reliably, and is pretty committed to doing things right (tm). This has meant fewer/slower hot features in the past, but solid when they arrive. It feels like they've pulled ahead in many features now. My favorite is all the indexing options. It may be undeserved now, but MySQL had/has a reputation for a lot of sloppy work for good enough features or for performance. Mysql dropped MyISAM for InnoDB in an effort to undo some of that damage so it's hard for me to say they're not committed to quality now. But reputations take time to rebuild.

barrkel 7y ago

PostgreSQL is way more featureful than MySQL, and the recent parallelization optimizations do add a significant competitive advantage over MySQL. What kept MySQL in the popularity lead for so long, though, was its solid async replication story. It wasn't until fairly recently that Postgres had that natively, rather than by third parties.

dano 7y ago

I think the larger programming community is coming around to the stability and good engineering present in the Postgresql development team and code base. Over the past decade we've seen a lot of different data storage options presented that have exchanged critical data integrity features for speed, architecture, "document storage", or some other fad factor of the day. I've been using Postgresql in a production environment since 2004, having converted from MySQL and never looked back. I'm not bagging on the other technologies, they're great for certain tasks, its just that Postgresql is great data storage and query engine and I think you'll grow to love it. I recommend the #postgresql community on Freenode as they are helpful and generous with their time. Someone on HN once said "Postgres is the answer until proven otherwise" and that's a pretty good sentiment.