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by patrickdavey 823 days ago
I have a handful of sites I run on a VPS with a basic setup, including MySQL.

One thing I've always liked about MySQL is that it pretty much looks after itself, whereas with Postgres I've had issues before doing upgrades (this was with brew though) and I'm not clear on whether it looks after itself for vacuuming etc.

Should I just give it a go the next time I'm upgrading? It does seem like a tool I need to get familiar with.

3 comments

Its got a lot better over the years.

25+ years ago MySQL was fast and easy to admin but didn't have rollback and a bunch of other features. At the same time Postgres had the features but was horrible for performance and usability. Those days are LONG gone. Mysql obviously has all the features and PG is great to admin and the auto-vacuum works well out of the box.

I run a bunch of clusters of pg servers around the world and they need almost no maintenance. In place upgrades without needing to go the dump/restore route work well, 5 minutes on a TB sized database, just make very VERY sure you do a reindex afterwards or you will be in a world of pain.

> PG is great to admin

What do you use for it? Is there anything like phpmyadmin for postgres with similar simplicity?

Coming myself from MySQL to Postgres I found PgAdmin (https://www.pgadmin.org/screenshots/#7) easy to use
Pgadmin has gotten lots of bad feedback. I'm using dBeaver or the IntelliJ sidebar to connect to the database.

Dbeaver is more useful. But you can do everything from the command line. You use sql to write database migrations anyway, no?

I guess it's better now. Last time I tried years ago it was horrible
The price is right and auto-vacuuming is a thing.
Postgres updates are definitely a pain. MySQL is usually just a matter of upgrading the package and restarting the server for the projects I run, but postgres is a full dump and import process.
I manage many PostgreSQL databases, the only time it was a pain, it was due to PostGIS upgrade but not the postgresql cluster itself…

You don’t need to dump and re import the database since a long long time…