In fairness, Postgres seems to be the most "SQL" of the variants out there... at least in terms of my understanding of the common SQL dialect(s). So probably n

In fairness, Postgres seems to be the most "SQL" of the variants out there... at least in terms of my understanding of the common SQL dialect(s). So probably not a bad first choice. By comparison, every single time I've touched MySQL/MariaDB I find at least one new thing that irks me to no end. UTF8 vs UTFMB4 or whatever it is for starters. Indexes on Binary data fields not being case insensitive (binary) by default, even if the default index for text is different is another. Not sure if it's still an issue, but that you can use ANSI quotes for everything but foreign key definitions was another I seem to remember. The fact that magic quotes could escape out of quoted strings another still. And that's just off the top of my head, and doesn't get into some of the default data handling that's just bad. SQLite has some similar issues there, but imo it's far more forgivable given SQLite's footprint and embedded nature. I also really like(d) Firebird when I'd used it in the past, but it's not nearly as popular.