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I love how easy it is to get started with MySQL and historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. For years, though, I've felt that the small proble

I love how easy it is to get started with MySQL and historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. For years, though, I've felt that the small problems where SQLite is useful now cover all the former MySQL ground. Once you exceed the power of SQLite, the features and performance and standards compliance and reliability and flexibility and correctness constraints and transaction execution and ongoing feature development of Postgres overwhelm the use case for MySQL.

mutation 13y ago
> historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. The quality of Postgres' documentation was the thing that was a big plus for me more than 10 years ago when I started fiddling with databases. MySQL came with one big 1MB+ HTML file, while Postgres had nicely organized multi-HTML docs. Even if you know nothing about databases, my vote goes to Postgres' docs for really good explanations of what to do, and what's going on. Of course, nowadays everything's easy with apt-get and stuff.
twic 13y ago
> I love how easy it is to get started with MySQL and historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. s/My/Postgre/ Seriously, on any platform you might reasonably use in the last five years, PostgreSQL is in the package manager, and installation is one command, just like anything else. Some packagings even create an initial database for you; for those which don't, it's just: sudo -i postgres initdb createuser wildutah createdb -O wildutah wildutah I think the PostgreSQL manual is very good. The one weakness that i can see is that there isn't (that i know of) a single-page soup-to-nuts getting started guide for someone simply using PostgreSQL locally. There are blog posts which do the job, but it would be nice to have something official.
- collyw 13y ago
  Postgres requires enough fiddling with the basic user, that it can be off putting. MySQL tends to be just installed almost everywhere, and usually doesn't need any configuration.
- nasalgoat 13y ago
  I've converted from MySQL on previous project to MongoDB then to PostgreSQL with my current project, and I have to agree that the time it takes to get up and running with Postgres is still a bit behind MySQL. The user permission system, the file-based authentication, the strange backslash command structure, the "no feedback" nature of the replication solution vs. the status report in MySQL all make Postgres a lot more "newbie unfriendly".

mutation 13y ago

> historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. The quality of Postgres' documentation was the thing that was a big plus for me more than 10 years ago when I started fiddling with databases. MySQL came with one big 1MB+ HTML file, while Postgres had nicely organized multi-HTML docs. Even if you know nothing about databases, my vote goes to Postgres' docs for really good explanations of what to do, and what's going on. Of course, nowadays everything's easy with apt-get and stuff.

twic 13y ago

> I love how easy it is to get started with MySQL and historically it's had a great user manual for beginners. s/My/Postgre/ Seriously, on any platform you might reasonably use in the last five years, PostgreSQL is in the package manager, and installation is one command, just like anything else. Some packagings even create an initial database for you; for those which don't, it's just: sudo -i postgres initdb createuser wildutah createdb -O wildutah wildutah I think the PostgreSQL manual is very good. The one weakness that i can see is that there isn't (that i know of) a single-page soup-to-nuts getting started guide for someone simply using PostgreSQL locally. There are blog posts which do the job, but it would be nice to have something official.

collyw 13y ago
Postgres requires enough fiddling with the basic user, that it can be off putting. MySQL tends to be just installed almost everywhere, and usually doesn't need any configuration.
nasalgoat 13y ago
I've converted from MySQL on previous project to MongoDB then to PostgreSQL with my current project, and I have to agree that the time it takes to get up and running with Postgres is still a bit behind MySQL. The user permission system, the file-based authentication, the strange backslash command structure, the "no feedback" nature of the replication solution vs. the status report in MySQL all make Postgres a lot more "newbie unfriendly".