[combatentropy]

> why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL

You'll see the same phenomenon on Slashdot.

MySQL is popular among a subset of programmers: web developers. In corporations, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are more popular. Further, MySQL is popular among a subset of web developers: those who use PHP. Among web developers who use Python, Postgres seems more popular.

My suspicion is that MySQL's popularity is tied to those web-hosting plans (1 GB of storage! 1 TB of bandwidth! 10 databases! $10/month!). They were almost always MySQL databases. Web hosts that offered Postgres databases were few and far between. This article corroborates my theory: http://rodner.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-makes-mysql-so-popul.... MySQL's company (which at the time was "MySQL" not Oracle) pushed it in at a critical time in the development of the web.

I have written applications that use: Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle. My favorite by far is Postgres. The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

[manigandham]

> Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

Based on what? Both commercial databases have incredible features, tooling and extensions that leave postgres behind. Postgres today doesn't even have a solid scale-up or scale-out strategy.

It does have nice SQL support and makes developer lives a little easier but this isnt anywhere close to making it the absolute winner technically.

[e12e]

I'm curious what you mean by Postgres not having a "scale-up" strategy. Are you saying that eg MS SQL works better with a few TBs of ram and 128 cores than Postgres does?

[manigandham]

Yes. Postgres famously has been single-threaded for queries for a long time. The upcoming version 9.6 is finally introducing some basic parallel scan/join/aggregate functionality.

MS SQL, Oracle and pretty much all the commercial databases are much farther along in scaling up and making the most of a single machine.

[jeltz]

The very article you are commenting on is about scaling up with PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is excellent at scaling up with many small queries, but has problems with few large ones.

[manigandham]

This is a brand new commit, it's not today. There's been some good progress recently but Postgres historically hasn't been the best at scaling up, especially compared to the commercial engines.

[breakingcups]

I like and often use Postgres, but professionally use MSSQL a lot and I vastly prefer it for my use case. It has all the DB features I need for my products and it is easier to manage (when it comes to backups, for example). One could argue ease of use falls under a purely technical standpoint.

Could you elaborate a bit more on why you view Microsoft SQL Server as worse?

[combatentropy]

MSSQL's text comparison by default is case insensitive. Its limit clause is nonstandard (select top 10 * from . . .). Its syntax for other things, like trimming or casting, is just much more typing. Installing the driver on a Linux server is several times harder than Postgres. When I get the syntax wrong, all it gives me "General Error." The command-line tool to Postgres, psql, works much more smoothly and has many more features than MSSQL's tsql (and Oracle's isql, for that matter).

If you use MSSQL all the time, I have no doubt that you get along fine. You can get used to its ways, and most applications don't need features that aren't shared by almost all databases.

I didn't mean that if you use MSSQL then the app will always noticeably work worse than if you based it on Postgres. It's just that for someone who switches back and forth, MSSQL makes my life less enjoyable, provides no benefit, and costs a lot more money.

[brisance]

>>The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.

A lot of decisions are made holistically instead of a "purely technical standpoint". In large companies where there are still IT departments (e.g. use of Active Directory), MS is still very much the de facto platform, and SQL Server is the "logical" choice.

[gaius]

Consider that PG is adding wait events in the upcoming 9.6 release, a feature Oracle has had for about 20 years...

[ptaipale]

I'm curious abour another thing: like the previous comment asked about MySQL and MariaDB, and your answer cuts away MariaDB from the quote.

However, the trend seems to be from MySQL to MariaDB. Red Hat and many other Linux distros, for example, have moved to MariaDB. It doesn't feature Larry Ellison. So why not address it?

[tomc1985]

While I love me some PG, SQL Server is nothing to sneeze at. Was fairly impressed with it, never had any serious issues on an under-specced server once occupied by terrible programmers

[ris]

"MySQL is popular among a subset of programmers: web developers."

Slapdash web developers.

Most web developers I know now consider postgres the base standard.