[esaym]

There's been a large migration off of mysql to postgres simply because Oracle got the rights to mysql when they purchased Sun. That is what made me consider, ditching mysql.

The final straw came when I stood up a mysql 5.6 instance to use as a data warehouse for about 5TB of data (15 billion rows). To my horror after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of the SQL language. Most of the needed sql features for data warehouse queries were simply not there (no WITH clause, no ROW_NUMBER(), only one sequence per table, no schema support, and many others that SQL report ninjas love to use)

With that I had to go back to management and convince them to put more time into the project so we could try again with postgresql. There was a large learning curve to go to postgres. It was just different in many areas, but at the same time, reminded me alot of IBM DB2 (both were a product of the 1980's if you look at the history). Postgres fit into our plans nicely, it actually had a full blown intelligent query parser and optimizer unlike mysql. From what I learned, mysql's purpose was to stop people from using text files as storage points in the early 2000's. But once you graduate from that, it's onward to postgres from there.

[simoncion]

> From what I learned, mysql's purpose was to stop people from using text files as storage points in the early 2000's.

Well shit, SQLite has that market sewn up these days.

[orf]

> after spending a few weeks on this project I discovered that mysql only supported a small subset of SQL

Did you not research this beforehand?

[esaym]

At the time, my basic experience with databases had been for normal developer CRUD type operations. I was just getting into BI analytics and stuff. MySql was kind of the defacto choice for a "free" database and it was kind of thrown at me. I didn't mind since I had used it for years and was familiar with setting it up. But no, assuming the thing with "SQL" in its name didn't actually support SQL was not on my checklist sadly.

[threeseed]

> There's been a large migration off of mysql to postgres

No there hasn't:

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking

Which makes sense since they aren't really playing in the same space. The benefits of PostgreSQL are largely lost on typical MySQL use cases (light load, simple CRUD access patterns, limited use of JSON/BSON etc).

[majewsky]

I question the method. They mostly measure search results, job offerings and tweets about the DB. And that could just as well mean a "MySQL is shit" tweet, an opening for a DBA that can migrate away from MySQL, and so on.

[nathan_long]

> Which makes sense since they aren't really playing in the same space. The benefits of PostgreSQL are largely lost on typical MySQL use cases (light load, simple CRUD access patterns, limited use of JSON/BSON etc).

What benefits do you see that MySQL has over PostgreSQL? What defines its niche?

[narrator]

The funny thing is is that the trend for analyzing data is going from doing things in SQL databases backed data warehouses with queries to running that stuff on clusters with Spark or Hadoop based solutions.

[ec109685]

If it can fit on a single machine, those technologies are not necessary.