Not up to date, but a decade ago MySQL supported pluggable storage engines and so had had some good non-default choices. It was possible to fit really big data

Not up to date, but a decade ago MySQL supported pluggable storage engines and so had had some good non-default choices. It was possible to fit really big databases onto small boxes using tokudb, for example. This doesn't explain why it was so popular for starting new small projects, but people were also choosing mongodb at that time too, so ymmv :) Nowadays postgres has grown a lot of features but I believe it is still behind on built-in compression? Added: this old blog post of mine is still getting traffic 10 years later; probably still valid https://williame.github.io/post/25080396258.html https://williame.github.io/post/25080396258.html