[sitharus]

MySQL gained popularity in the late 90s/early 2000s because they took the opposite tactic to PostgreSQL. While PostgreSQL aimed to be a complete SQL rdbms and then become a fast one MySQL aimed to be fast then complete. Also MySQL chose defaults suitable for web application hosting so needed little out of the box configuration.

This meant MySQL was popular in the dotcom boom, and certainly with PHP developers. So MySQL got mindshare even if it has many flaws. Similar to how perl was the language to use in the early web days.

[forinti]

In my experience, most people who used MySQL simply hadn't heard of PostgreSQL (which isn't hard to install either and probably performed well enough for everybody's requirements - at least everybody I talked to).

I used to ask, because I found it baffling that someone would choose an RDBMS that wouldn't even check the size of a column.

[cwisecarver]

I'm a Postgres convert. I used MySQL back in the day because I'd heard of Postgres and everyone said tuning it was a nightmare. May or may not have been true but there's enough documentation and books now, and maybe the configuration has become simpler. I no longer hear that Postgres is hard to configure but that it's an OSS enterprise RDBMS that's continuely improving. Even better, I've experienced that improvement over the last few years.

[btmorex]

For a very long time, MySQL had much, much better replication and some people would argue that it still does. It would be nice if MySQL were a little less lax in other regards, but replication is always going too be more important for production sites.

[lmm]

You'll get people who still pick C "for performance" when writing a system that has to handle about 10 requests/second. We have this strange desire to use "the fastest" regardless of whether performance actually matters for our use case and how much we're giving up for it.

[kalleboo]

> In my experience, most people who used MySQL simply hadn't heard of PostgreSQL

That just means the next question is, "why hadn't they heard of PostgreSQL"? It's not as if MySQL AB was taking out ads in the newspaper to create mindshare.

[forinti]

Probably because of all the LAMP tutorials, I reckon.