3 ms·

Ok, here's one: When you give MySQL invalid data, its standard behavior is to just silently store garbage in your database in many cases where PostgreSQL would'

• CaveTech 4y ago
  Hasnt been the case for a few major versions, unless you want to anthropomorphise your db and and hold it accountable for past behaviour.
  • ok_dad 4y ago
    > unless you want to anthropomorphise your db and and hold it accountable for past behaviour No one is holding the literal bits that make up the database executable accountable here, they are indicating they don't trust the devs of MySQL/MariaDB to do a good job. Whether or not that is an accurate view on their part is arguable, but it's pretty clear from context that they don't think that several if/else statements had it out for them.
• bakugo 4y ago
  > MySQL's handling of unicode has also been terrible historically, with way too many foot guns, but I don't know if that may be better with recent versions. Unicode generally "just works" if the charset in use is utf8mb4. As of MySQL 8.0, this is the default.
  • mort96 4y ago
    Ah, that's good to hear. I haven't looked seriously at databases other than SQLite for a long time, it would be interesting to see a more up to date evaluation.
• evanelias 4y ago
  > When you give MySQL invalid data, its standard behavior is to just silently store garbage This is a common misconception, but this hasn't been the case for over 7 years. MySQL 5.7, released in Oct 2015, changed its defaults to enable strict sql_mode. All prior versions have hit end-of-life for support years ago, so there is no modern version of MySQL with this silent truncation behavior. The only reason this problem persists is because Amazon RDS (all versions and forms, including Aurora) uses nonstandard default settings which disable strict mode! That all said, I do believe Postgres is an excellent database, and a great choice for quite a large range of use-cases. But please, let's compare 2023 Postgres with 2023 MySQL, not 2023 Postgres with much older MySQL. It's only fair.
  • jbverschoor 4y ago
    Why do they have these settings? Because shit software used shit MySQL +data corruption. It might be better now. But for me it’s in the same shithole as mongodb, php (old style, so no recovery there even though it’s possible to create proper code) and most JavaScript. Other things is that people don’t even want to use Oracle’s MySQL but MariaDB. Why the hell would I want to run a fork of something, and still keep calling it something else. The only reason for MySQL is wordpress
  • justinclift 4y ago
    > But please, let's compare 2023 Postgres with 2023 MySQL, not 2023 Postgres with much older MySQL. It's only fair. Heh Heh Heh On a humorous note, the official MySQL page (in the early 2000's) comparing MySQL vs other databases had the same problem. They'd list the latest and greatest MySQL version, but compare it against archaic versions of the others. Clearly on purpose, because "Marketing" probably. Asked them (via official @postgresql.org email address) to please update that page to more a recent PostgreSQL, for fairness. And was completely ignored of course. So it's kind of amusing to see a request for fairness in the opposite direction (which I agree with anyway) ~20 years later. ;)
• AdamJacobMuller 4y ago
  A lot of the MySQL issues historically have been fixed. UTF-8 is better now, invalid data handling is better (by default even! though your distros default config probably puts you back in permissive mode!) but regardless I'm still using Postgres every single time. The fact is that MySQL historically was terrible for complex schemas with complex types while postgres was a pleasure to work with. MySQL had a huge performance edge for many years but that came at a cost of resiliency and reliability. MySQL has greatly improved on these key areas and Postgres has also made significant performance improvements. Systems these days are also so powerful that the database probably isn't your benchmark. Regardless, I always use Postgres every single time because I am just scarred from years of dealing with MySQL. What even is MySQL is also an open question at this point, there's MySQL and MariaDB and Percona flavors and the founder of Percona was just ousted and I can't be bothered to put in mental energy to untangle all this to even figure out what MySQL I should be developing against. Compare this to Postgres where the community seems to have an extremely steady hand and constant progress. There's no forks, there's no infighting, there's no drama, there's a great regular release schedule with incremental improvements.
  • bcrosby95 4y ago
    In MySQLandia, we do not speak of utf8, we only speak of utf8mb4.