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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Probably because of all the LAMP tutorials, I reckon.

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