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In my very humble and naive opinion, MySQL has the whole 'worse is better' thing going for it. Does less, does it maybe less than perfect, but it does it very q

by donatj 5y ago

In my very humble and naive opinion, MySQL has the whole 'worse is better' thing going for it. Does less, does it maybe less than perfect, but it does it very quickly and reliably. We've personally scaled MySQL to many tens of thousands of concurrent users without too much trouble and without a dedicated person watching the database. That said, I've only really worked significantly with MSSQL and MySQL, so my points of comparison are based largely on what I've heard. The majority of my last 15 professional years have been spent with MySQL.

tossaway9000 5y ago
> MySQL has the whole 'worse is better' thing going for it. I've used both MySQL and PostgreSQL and I prefer MySQL, it seems to work and scale better "out of the box" and has a more comprehensible permission model than Postgres. I might be biased somewhat as I've used MySQL a lot longer and have even written plugins to interop with it but its still my number 2 go to (after SQLite)
tabtab 5y ago
In general it seems MySql targets start-ups while PostgreSql targets more established companies and projects. It's not necessarily about good-vs-bad, but using the right tool for the job.
vanusa 5y ago
That's a perfectly reasonable assessment. Also, it's certainly a dream product compared to anything on the market 20 years ago. So yeah, it's fair to say the original blog post could have been more nuanced in its holistic assessment of MySQL. But then again, you can tell he was worn down from his experience working there. The industry has a way of doing that to people.
dijit 5y ago
MySQL used to be the "has more features" camp, I'm not sure why you think it does less. There are many things that MySQL does that Postgres still can't do, like memory tables or pluggable storage engines. And for anecdatum: I've been serving a million people concurrently on PG without any handholding except the initial setup: but that tells you nothing about what we were actually doing with it.
- CoffeeOnWrite 5y ago
  > pluggable storage engines. I can help shed light here. Postgres doesn’t make you choose between two storage engines and their compromises. It’s been years, but last time I looked the trade offs between MySQL storage engines were material and the newer engine was missing some valuable features of the older one. The advice was “pick the right engine for the job” - but I don’t want to, that another decision I have to make, why make me do that? At least until they come out with a new storage engine that’s “objectively better than Postgres”, I will enjoy the simplicity of using Postgres with its single storage engine. Choice isn’t always better. I searched to see if anything has changed and found that InnoDB doesn’t support full text search - give me break, after it’s been the default for years, you gotta be kidding. https://hevodata.com/learn/myisam-vs-innodb/ https://hevodata.com/learn/myisam-vs-innodb/
  - evanelias 5y ago
    You should find more reputable sources for this information. InnoDB has supported fulltext indexes since MySQL 5.6, released almost 9 years ago. Here's the manual page from 5.6: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-index.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-inde...
    - gkop 5y ago
      That’s good to know! If the first result is not reputable, that’s still a smell (but a different kind of smell) for MySQL. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=innodb+vs+myisam https://duckduckgo.com/?q=innodb+vs+myisam
      - evanelias 5y ago
        I disagree. Search engines put more weight on recent articles, and no reputable source is writing about this topic in years, for one simple reason: there is no valid reason to choose the MyISAM storage engine in 2021. This was true even a decade ago. Hevodata.com appears to be selling an ETL product. This post you're linking to is effectively SEO / content marketing. It is not written by MySQL experts. Regarding fulltext support in InnoDB, there are many results when searching for "innodb fulltext".
ruffrey 5y ago
Postgres now has UNLOGGED tables which are pretty similar to memory tables.

by donatj 5y ago

tossaway9000 5y ago

> MySQL has the whole 'worse is better' thing going for it. I've used both MySQL and PostgreSQL and I prefer MySQL, it seems to work and scale better "out of the box" and has a more comprehensible permission model than Postgres. I might be biased somewhat as I've used MySQL a lot longer and have even written plugins to interop with it but its still my number 2 go to (after SQLite)

tabtab 5y ago

In general it seems MySql targets start-ups while PostgreSql targets more established companies and projects. It's not necessarily about good-vs-bad, but using the right tool for the job.

vanusa 5y ago

That's a perfectly reasonable assessment. Also, it's certainly a dream product compared to anything on the market 20 years ago. So yeah, it's fair to say the original blog post could have been more nuanced in its holistic assessment of MySQL. But then again, you can tell he was worn down from his experience working there. The industry has a way of doing that to people.

dijit 5y ago

MySQL used to be the "has more features" camp, I'm not sure why you think it does less. There are many things that MySQL does that Postgres still can't do, like memory tables or pluggable storage engines. And for anecdatum: I've been serving a million people concurrently on PG without any handholding except the initial setup: but that tells you nothing about what we were actually doing with it.

CoffeeOnWrite 5y ago
> pluggable storage engines. I can help shed light here. Postgres doesn’t make you choose between two storage engines and their compromises. It’s been years, but last time I looked the trade offs between MySQL storage engines were material and the newer engine was missing some valuable features of the older one. The advice was “pick the right engine for the job” - but I don’t want to, that another decision I have to make, why make me do that? At least until they come out with a new storage engine that’s “objectively better than Postgres”, I will enjoy the simplicity of using Postgres with its single storage engine. Choice isn’t always better. I searched to see if anything has changed and found that InnoDB doesn’t support full text search - give me break, after it’s been the default for years, you gotta be kidding. https://hevodata.com/learn/myisam-vs-innodb/ https://hevodata.com/learn/myisam-vs-innodb/
- evanelias 5y ago
  You should find more reputable sources for this information. InnoDB has supported fulltext indexes since MySQL 5.6, released almost 9 years ago. Here's the manual page from 5.6: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-index.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/innodb-fulltext-inde...
  - gkop 5y ago
    That’s good to know! If the first result is not reputable, that’s still a smell (but a different kind of smell) for MySQL. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=innodb+vs+myisam https://duckduckgo.com/?q=innodb+vs+myisam
    - evanelias 5y ago
      I disagree. Search engines put more weight on recent articles, and no reputable source is writing about this topic in years, for one simple reason: there is no valid reason to choose the MyISAM storage engine in 2021. This was true even a decade ago. Hevodata.com appears to be selling an ETL product. This post you're linking to is effectively SEO / content marketing. It is not written by MySQL experts. Regarding fulltext support in InnoDB, there are many results when searching for "innodb fulltext".

ruffrey 5y ago

Postgres now has UNLOGGED tables which are pretty similar to memory tables.