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Comment by nchelluri | Hacker News Reader

You know what, about two weeks ago I was starting a new Rails hobby project, and I thought "all I've heard about for the past year is how everyone loves Postgres", and was about to throw it in there, when I saw a link to Google search trends comparing the two, and MySQL is still so far ahead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=mysql,+postgr...

It's quite possible this is just due to people supporting existing applications, but I dunno, I am tempted to stick with MySQL for new stuff for the next little while.

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MySQL is popular because it's easy to use (in the same sense as PHP), easy to setup, and has a lot of tutorials written for it. Also speed used to be a pretty big factor, but that was only because MyISAM took shortcuts with data consistency.

If you care about your data and would rather not deal with the many problems MySQL inevitably brings, then Postgres is the better option. I can't say I've seen many compelling reasons to use MySQL over Postgres other than "what if we need to replace you with a freelance PHP guy", "I want to pay lower wages", and "I want to use phpmyadmin". (Btw: check out Sequel Pro and Querious!)

Popularity isn't a very good reason to choose something. Postgres will remain a juggernaut for a long time. Unless you really think there's a good chance you'll need to hire somebody that only knows MySQL, then I'd go with Postgres.

That may be why MySQL is popular for small installations, but that's not why it's popular with companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Pinterest who run replicated clusters that number in the thousands.

It's popular at scale because unlike Postgres, it has replication that is well understood, is reliable, and isn't a massive pain in the ass to operate.

Please point me to the well-understood, reliable replication solution for MySQL (I'll agree about pain in the ass to operate re: Postgres, but you might want to check out aphyr's recent posts).

Given I haven't done anything with it in nearly 7 years now.. but every time I've touched MySQL for anything, there was always a quirky behavior that bit me in the ass that no other dbms does...

Postgres, MS-SQL, Firebird, Oracle, DB2 are all better options in my mind... unless you need a good replication story, without a pricey support contract, then Postgres and Firebird are sadly out of the running imho.

Is google trends really how you should be choosing your stack?

Choose? I'd argue no. But inform your choice? Sure.

Looking at trends can help you:

- See how easy hiring people will be in the future.

- See the likelihood that your chosen framework will lose support.

- See the likelihood of third party support/addons/libraries/etc.

- How easy it will be to find help/tutorials/guides/etc.

But looking at it, to me, seems prudent.

One of the reasons MySQL is still popular is Wordpress.

It seems weird to me that Postgres and MySQL are both going down. I'd expect interest in Postgres to be rising at the very least—what are people switching to?

Probably hosted SaaS offernings, some of which may actually be Postgres and MySQL... just there's less need for queries about operations issues.

There's also a lot of NoSQL solutions that are being ever more widely used. Most of which have much lower costs for HA early on.

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