[treeman79]

MySQL was also a lot faster in the early days.

Plus it “just worked” not sanely mind you. But you had a lot less problems with type mismatches, up/downcast, etc. Well unless you wanted quality data. But back then we were just happy that it didn’t bother us with “minor” details.

[hoistbypetard]

It was a lot faster, and sometimes the odds that your data might live long enough for those integrity issues to matter seemed very remote.

Around 2001, the conventional wisdom was that it was worth the risk to take the performance victory, keep your hosting bill down, use mysql, and build some other approach to data integrity. (If memory serves, the integrity downsides were bigger then, too...)

The math is pretty different now. I'm not sure it's fair to hang all of it on Oracle, but it feels like that acquisition derailed some MySQL progress that might've made it a close call today. Now, I use Postgres unless I have a very specific, very compelling reason not to.