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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

> Anyone can share what makes PostgreSQL so successful? Maybe other projects can learn adopt a few of these good practices.

Since honesty is a theme of this thread, let's be real here. PgSQL is popular now only because Oracle killed MySQL.

This is not to denigrate the work of the Postgres team -- it's easily one of the best-managed open-source projects and my admiration for them is immense -- but ~95% of the time, the tech stack is chosen as a fashion statement.

MySQL was fashionable until Oracle showed up. Postgres has been trucking along for decades and has essentially won by default. I don't know if there are many great marketing insights to take away, other than "stay out of the way of the $50B gorilla".

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Absolutely don't agree. Sure, Mysql mostly became very popular with the rise of PHP in the early 2000's, but Postgres was popular in many less visible industries.

In my 'world', MySQL was seen as an amateur database engine, and never really lost that label. There was some serious hesitation towards Postgres back-then, but eventually it became a good alternative to the commercial RDBMS's. I know we eventually switched everything over. Until the mid 2000's - our server-side software was still sold as a 'blackbox', managed by us, with no mention of it running linux and postgres, but eventually these became more accepted technologies, and towards many of our clients even a selling point. The rise of Redhat in the enterpricy world helped a lot with that.

I agreed with you until the "fashion" thing.

Yes, Postgres adoption and development really picked up steam once Oracle acquired MySQL and quickly confirmed everybody's fears: they bought it primarily to ensure that MySQL stayed something of a "toy" database.

But the "fashion" thing is needless, insulting, and not even correct in my opinion. As far as mindless fashion trends in the industry go, traditional RDBMS's like Postgres are almost the antithesis of fashion.

I should clarify. I'm not saying that Postgres is unworthy or that its adoption is fashion-driven -- it's part of the 5-10% that is driven by practicality. That is only the case now because, as you said, there is no fashionable conventional RDBMS anymore. It's all about transferring as much money as humanly possible to Jeff Bezos now. :)

The grandparent was asking what we can learn from Postgres in terms of driving adoption, as I understood it. And the reality is that most of Postgres's recent adoption uptick is because there really aren't many other options. It's not a good example of driving adoption in a crowded market, etc.

My apologies for being unclear before, and thanks for pointing it out so I can try to clarify.

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