[mdnormy]

Familiarity?

MySQL/MariaDB is pretty much the "standard" database that most programmer started with. At least in university.

So there is no point on using PosgreSQL if MariaDB fits the bill for them. Less learning curve, easy to hire for etc

[takeda]

I actually had databases class which used MySQL for exercises and essentially it was like this:

* you can configure triggers for a table, but you can't use them in MySQL unless you make sure the table is InnoDB (this was a while ago before defaults changed)

* MySQL doesn't support aborting INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE from trigger, but you can emulate it by throwing an exception

* a table can have a CHECK constraint, but you can't use it because it is not available in MySQL

Makes one wonder MySQL was picked for that class. I get that it was because it was very popular at the time, but it felt like a toy compared to a functionality that any other database had.

[jstarfish]

Also the default database on most shared hosting, so anybody who got a start in web dev likely cut their teeth on MySQL.

[type0]

Yeah, LAMP stacks are to blame for it's popularity.

[technion]

University?

I'm interested in what people's experiences here are. I spent the entire of my degree deep in Oracle, persistently being warned a database without object-relational queries were absolutely never used in the real world (how ironic).