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It's really nice to see more content for MySQL/MariaDB still being made, since it feels like they are still good solutions for a whole variety of situations! Wh

It's really nice to see more content for MySQL/MariaDB still being made, since it feels like they are still good solutions for a whole variety of situations! While I might look in the direction of PostgreSQL for more advanced in-database processing, for most CRUD apps the aforementioned two are going to be more than enough!

hu3 4y ago
> While I might look in the direction of PostgreSQL for more advanced in-database processing, for most CRUD apps the aforementioned two are going to be more than enough I see this sentiment often here on HN. Something long the lines of "MySQL is enough for small apps but you want PotgreSQL for serious work." When in practice I find the opposite to be true. PotgreSQL is hard to scale and hard to upgrade when compared to MySQL. I mean, just take a look at the caliber of companies that leverage MySQL at scale using Vitess to orchestrate it (spoiler, it powers Youtube, GitHub, Slack, Shopify and more): https://planetscale.com/vitess https://planetscale.com/vitess What's PostgreSQL comparable list?
- mulmen 4y ago
  > What's PostgreSQL comparable list? Netflix, Instagram, Spotify, Skype, Reddit, Twitch, Yahoo. e: removed Uber.
  - samlambert 4y ago
    Yahoo, Uber, Instagram, and Spotify all run on MySQL. https://www.uber.com/en-JP/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-JP/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/
    - pritambarhate 4y ago
      Instagram definitely runs on PostgreSQL. Here is official Instagram engineering blog mentioning the same: https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of-technologies-adf2e22da2ad https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hund... > Most of our data (users, photo metadata, tags, etc) lives in PostgreSQL; we’ve previously written about how we shard across our different Postgres instances Another relatively big company that uses PostgreSQL is Gitlab.
  - hu3 4y ago
    Did Uber reverted back to PostgreSQL after switching to MySQL? https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ And as far as I know Netflix was a big Cassandra user then migrated to CockroachDB. I tried to search for "Netflix Postgresql" and found this comment from 2016 stating that they chose MySQL over PostgreSQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11950811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11950811 Could you share a source?
    - mulmen 4y ago
      I just did a few quacks for "companies using postgresql". Tried to keep it to posts in the last couple years. Didn't look too closely. Best source I found is https://www.thomsondata.com/customer-base/companies-that-use-postgresql.php https://www.thomsondata.com/customer-base/companies-that-use... but not sure how current it is.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > What's PostgreSQL comparable list? I'm sure that others can comment on that, but in my experience PL/pgSQL is the killer feature that's hard to beat in PostgreSQL, for those cases where you want to store some amount of logic in the database itself (MySQL stored procedures feel a bit more limited). That said, it's not even the only procedural language that is available: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xplang.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xplang.html In addition, working with JSON in PostgreSQL can be pretty nice for niche use cases, as is using PostGIS for geospatial data, in addition to some of the REST (e.g. PostgREST) or GraphQL (e.g. PostGraphile) projects, if you want to interact with the database as something that exposes web endpoints to let you retrieve and manipulate data directly, as opposed to just SQL communication with some back end. That's not to say that MySQL or MariaDB don't have their own great offerings, but it's clear that PostgreSQL has gotten a lot of love in regards to people developing various integrations and extensions. That said, usually not needing the equivalent of PgBouncer out of the box is nice and personally MySQL Workbench feels better than pgAdmin due to the advanced ER functionality (forwards/backwards engineering and schema synchronization, so that you can create versioned DB migrations more easily if you write them in plain SQL). Edit: as for some crowd sourced data, a quick search turned up this from a few years ago: https://learnsql.com/blog/companies-that-use-postgresql-in-business/ https://learnsql.com/blog/companies-that-use-postgresql-in-b... But then again, all of the mentioned RDBMSes have proven themselves as viable for a variety of projects.
  - melvinmelih 4y ago
    > where you want to store some amount of logic in the database itself If you’ve ever worked on a decently sized project, you’ll quickly realize this is an anti-pattern that you should avoid at all cost. Imagine having multiple teams updating that logic without any version control or visibility in what’s stored in pg.
    - jasonkester 4y ago
      Version control works just as well for .sql files as it does for any other code extension. If your shop isn't using version control for the database, that's the problem.
- pritambarhate 4y ago
  This kind of argument that XYZ company uses ABC software so it's also good for my project is not correct. Your requirements and their requirements are different. Also for many of the above companies, when they were started MySQL used to be the popular solution, so they started with it and stayed with it. The way Facebook or Uber uses MySQL is not how you will use it. Both PostgreSQL and MySQL are powerful databases and if you have right people with proper knowledge highly scalable systems can be developed with both. The reason PostgreSQL is recommended in last 8-10 years is because just before that time, though MySQL was very popular it had some issues which were solved by PostgreSQL. So when web developers encountered those problems and they saw that PostgreSQL didn't have those issues, they started recommending PostgreSQL. In my personal case, I was responsible for managing a Wordpress site with a few million visitors every day. (This is before AWS RDS, we had to set replication manually in those days) We had set up replication with MySQL 5.6. At that time MySQL replication had a few issues, and it used to break every few days. At that time PostgreSQL replication which I was using in other projects was rock solid. So I started recommending PostgreSQL over MySQL. For others they have similar stories but for different issues they faced in MySQL. Over the years of MySQL has improved and so has PostgreSQL.
  - evanelias 4y ago
    > The way Facebook or Uber uses MySQL is not how you will use it. With large companies like Meta/Facebook, there is no singular "way" that the company uses a particular database. Larger companies typically have self-service generic managed database infrastructure, similar to RDS but internal. The workloads tend to be quite varied. > (This is before AWS RDS, we had to set replication manually in those days) We had set up replication with > MySQL 5.6. At that time MySQL replication had a few issues, and it used to break every few days. Your chronology isn't right: AWS RDS was released in Oct 2009, and gained multi-AZ replication in May 2010. At this time, Postgres didn't even have built-in replication support at all yet; it first gained built-in streaming replication support in Postgres 9.0, released in Sept 2010. Meanwhile MySQL 5.6 was released (GA) in Feb 2013, several years after RDS already existed. In any case, if your replication was breaking every few days in MySQL 5.6, that was something specific to your environment / configuration / workload. What you're describing is definitely far from common. If a replication stream breaking this often was the typical experience with MySQL 5.6, at Facebook's scale we would have had a replication breakage every few seconds, and that definitively was not the case. That's especially true with out-of-the-box software like WordPress. I can't imagine Automattic experienced frequent replication breakages with a normal WP workload, as this would have been hugely operationally problematic for their hosted wordpress.com product. Perhaps you had a misbehaving plugin performing non-deterministic DML or something like that? That all said -- Postgres is an amazing database, and there are many good reasons to choose it; but as with all technical choices, there's a set of trade-offs to consider. For example, originally Postgres only supported physical replication, not logical replication, and this made upgrading to a new major version quite painful as compared to MySQL.
AYBABTME 4y ago
If by "advanced in-database processing" you mean stuff like PostGIS, then yes PostgreSQL is the right approach. But for most people building web-apps to scale, or established businesses who want to pick a solution and stick to it for basically ever, MySQL is much easier to scale. There's a ton of companies running MySQL at scale. I never heard of the same for Postgres, and for a long while I had an intellectual preference for Postgres as being the more "pure" implementation. Experience in the field showed me that MySQL, despite its flaws, is the name of the game. Further "evidence" by referring to other experienced folks who worked on scaling SQL databases, and MySQL is what's used and what folks have experience with: - https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/1602347646961606656 - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/some-opinionated-sql-takes/#my-personal-choice-mysql
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  MySQL also has had major bugs in recent GA releases like crashing your server when renaming a table. PostgreSQL scales differently since it doesn't have redo-log based MVCC or other things as well. It does value correctness and has (mostly) better defaults. It has also had its own embarrassing bugs, though IME few put data integrity or availability at risk.
9dev 4y ago
I wonder where that "MySQL is easier to scale" trope comes from. Have you ever tried to set up and operate a MySQL/MariaDB cluster? It's a horrible and brittle shitshow. Even if you get it running, there's no guarantee things don't just turn south at any given moment. In Postgres, replication just... works.

hu3 4y ago

> While I might look in the direction of PostgreSQL for more advanced in-database processing, for most CRUD apps the aforementioned two are going to be more than enough I see this sentiment often here on HN. Something long the lines of "MySQL is enough for small apps but you want PotgreSQL for serious work." When in practice I find the opposite to be true. PotgreSQL is hard to scale and hard to upgrade when compared to MySQL. I mean, just take a look at the caliber of companies that leverage MySQL at scale using Vitess to orchestrate it (spoiler, it powers Youtube, GitHub, Slack, Shopify and more): https://planetscale.com/vitess https://planetscale.com/vitess What's PostgreSQL comparable list?

mulmen 4y ago
> What's PostgreSQL comparable list? Netflix, Instagram, Spotify, Skype, Reddit, Twitch, Yahoo. e: removed Uber.
- samlambert 4y ago
  Yahoo, Uber, Instagram, and Spotify all run on MySQL. https://www.uber.com/en-JP/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-JP/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/
  - pritambarhate 4y ago
    Instagram definitely runs on PostgreSQL. Here is official Instagram engineering blog mentioning the same: https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of-technologies-adf2e22da2ad https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hund... > Most of our data (users, photo metadata, tags, etc) lives in PostgreSQL; we’ve previously written about how we shard across our different Postgres instances Another relatively big company that uses PostgreSQL is Gitlab.
- hu3 4y ago
  Did Uber reverted back to PostgreSQL after switching to MySQL? https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ And as far as I know Netflix was a big Cassandra user then migrated to CockroachDB. I tried to search for "Netflix Postgresql" and found this comment from 2016 stating that they chose MySQL over PostgreSQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11950811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11950811 Could you share a source?
  - mulmen 4y ago
    I just did a few quacks for "companies using postgresql". Tried to keep it to posts in the last couple years. Didn't look too closely. Best source I found is https://www.thomsondata.com/customer-base/companies-that-use-postgresql.php https://www.thomsondata.com/customer-base/companies-that-use... but not sure how current it is.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
KronisLV 4y ago
> What's PostgreSQL comparable list? I'm sure that others can comment on that, but in my experience PL/pgSQL is the killer feature that's hard to beat in PostgreSQL, for those cases where you want to store some amount of logic in the database itself (MySQL stored procedures feel a bit more limited). That said, it's not even the only procedural language that is available: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xplang.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/xplang.html In addition, working with JSON in PostgreSQL can be pretty nice for niche use cases, as is using PostGIS for geospatial data, in addition to some of the REST (e.g. PostgREST) or GraphQL (e.g. PostGraphile) projects, if you want to interact with the database as something that exposes web endpoints to let you retrieve and manipulate data directly, as opposed to just SQL communication with some back end. That's not to say that MySQL or MariaDB don't have their own great offerings, but it's clear that PostgreSQL has gotten a lot of love in regards to people developing various integrations and extensions. That said, usually not needing the equivalent of PgBouncer out of the box is nice and personally MySQL Workbench feels better than pgAdmin due to the advanced ER functionality (forwards/backwards engineering and schema synchronization, so that you can create versioned DB migrations more easily if you write them in plain SQL). Edit: as for some crowd sourced data, a quick search turned up this from a few years ago: https://learnsql.com/blog/companies-that-use-postgresql-in-business/ https://learnsql.com/blog/companies-that-use-postgresql-in-b... But then again, all of the mentioned RDBMSes have proven themselves as viable for a variety of projects.
- melvinmelih 4y ago
  > where you want to store some amount of logic in the database itself If you’ve ever worked on a decently sized project, you’ll quickly realize this is an anti-pattern that you should avoid at all cost. Imagine having multiple teams updating that logic without any version control or visibility in what’s stored in pg.
  - jasonkester 4y ago
    Version control works just as well for .sql files as it does for any other code extension. If your shop isn't using version control for the database, that's the problem.
pritambarhate 4y ago
This kind of argument that XYZ company uses ABC software so it's also good for my project is not correct. Your requirements and their requirements are different. Also for many of the above companies, when they were started MySQL used to be the popular solution, so they started with it and stayed with it. The way Facebook or Uber uses MySQL is not how you will use it. Both PostgreSQL and MySQL are powerful databases and if you have right people with proper knowledge highly scalable systems can be developed with both. The reason PostgreSQL is recommended in last 8-10 years is because just before that time, though MySQL was very popular it had some issues which were solved by PostgreSQL. So when web developers encountered those problems and they saw that PostgreSQL didn't have those issues, they started recommending PostgreSQL. In my personal case, I was responsible for managing a Wordpress site with a few million visitors every day. (This is before AWS RDS, we had to set replication manually in those days) We had set up replication with MySQL 5.6. At that time MySQL replication had a few issues, and it used to break every few days. At that time PostgreSQL replication which I was using in other projects was rock solid. So I started recommending PostgreSQL over MySQL. For others they have similar stories but for different issues they faced in MySQL. Over the years of MySQL has improved and so has PostgreSQL.
- evanelias 4y ago
  > The way Facebook or Uber uses MySQL is not how you will use it. With large companies like Meta/Facebook, there is no singular "way" that the company uses a particular database. Larger companies typically have self-service generic managed database infrastructure, similar to RDS but internal. The workloads tend to be quite varied. > (This is before AWS RDS, we had to set replication manually in those days) We had set up replication with > MySQL 5.6. At that time MySQL replication had a few issues, and it used to break every few days. Your chronology isn't right: AWS RDS was released in Oct 2009, and gained multi-AZ replication in May 2010. At this time, Postgres didn't even have built-in replication support at all yet; it first gained built-in streaming replication support in Postgres 9.0, released in Sept 2010. Meanwhile MySQL 5.6 was released (GA) in Feb 2013, several years after RDS already existed. In any case, if your replication was breaking every few days in MySQL 5.6, that was something specific to your environment / configuration / workload. What you're describing is definitely far from common. If a replication stream breaking this often was the typical experience with MySQL 5.6, at Facebook's scale we would have had a replication breakage every few seconds, and that definitively was not the case. That's especially true with out-of-the-box software like WordPress. I can't imagine Automattic experienced frequent replication breakages with a normal WP workload, as this would have been hugely operationally problematic for their hosted wordpress.com product. Perhaps you had a misbehaving plugin performing non-deterministic DML or something like that? That all said -- Postgres is an amazing database, and there are many good reasons to choose it; but as with all technical choices, there's a set of trade-offs to consider. For example, originally Postgres only supported physical replication, not logical replication, and this made upgrading to a new major version quite painful as compared to MySQL.

AYBABTME 4y ago

If by "advanced in-database processing" you mean stuff like PostGIS, then yes PostgreSQL is the right approach. But for most people building web-apps to scale, or established businesses who want to pick a solution and stick to it for basically ever, MySQL is much easier to scale. There's a ton of companies running MySQL at scale. I never heard of the same for Postgres, and for a long while I had an intellectual preference for Postgres as being the more "pure" implementation. Experience in the field showed me that MySQL, despite its flaws, is the name of the game. Further "evidence" by referring to other experienced folks who worked on scaling SQL databases, and MySQL is what's used and what folks have experience with: - https://twitter.com/Sirupsen/status/1602347646961606656 - https://blog.nelhage.com/post/some-opinionated-sql-takes/#my-personal-choice-mysql

paulryanrogers 4y ago
MySQL also has had major bugs in recent GA releases like crashing your server when renaming a table. PostgreSQL scales differently since it doesn't have redo-log based MVCC or other things as well. It does value correctness and has (mostly) better defaults. It has also had its own embarrassing bugs, though IME few put data integrity or availability at risk.

9dev 4y ago

I wonder where that "MySQL is easier to scale" trope comes from. Have you ever tried to set up and operate a MySQL/MariaDB cluster? It's a horrible and brittle shitshow. Even if you get it running, there's no guarantee things don't just turn south at any given moment. In Postgres, replication just... works.