Hating to pile on, but doing so anyways, one of the overlooked things I'd argue is that postgresql tries much harder to let you do neat things with your data wi

Hating to pile on, but doing so anyways, one of the overlooked things I'd argue is that postgresql tries much harder to let you do neat things with your data without much hassle. Needing to write a custom function to process data? Not only does PostgreSQL have support for PL/PgSQL, but it's made in a way that has let people write plugins to python, perl, v8, tcl, etc, so you can do that data transformation on the database instead of shipping it back and forth to another server with the latency that brings. The recent version also brings read/write support to redis, so you have have your updates trigger redis to store new values, etc. Plus, being that it's not controlled by Oracle, there's much less a feeling of the community being held back; MySQL feels very much like Oracle's tying one hand back, so that when you get to the size to need a "real" database, Oracle will gladly step in, at their standard consulting fees, of course.