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Comment by Octoth0rpe | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's a bad theory, but I'd point more towards three particular events as critical:

1. Postgres 7 supporting windows (I _think_ 7 was the first). That brought a ton of users into the community

2. Oracle's acquisition of mysql, and subsequent forking. That caused a lot of people to look around for other solutions

3. Amazon RDS

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> 2. Oracle's acquisition of mysql, and subsequent forking. That caused a lot of people to look around for other solutions

It was this one for me.

I would add that it had a better reputation among users of "serious" databases. I first heard of Postgresql at companies built around big, expensive Oracle databases, managed by serious, battle-hardened DBAs with long experience with Oracle and DB2 and other big-iron databases. The ones who deigned to have an opinion about open-source databases spoke very differently of MySQL and Postgresql. They were openly derisive of MySQL and laughed it off as something that nobody who knew databases would ever use, but with PostgreSQL, a little bit of respect showed through their snobbery. They couldn't imagine building a business around it (they couldn't imagine building a business around anything that didn't cost the price of a decent car per CPU core) but they were willing to admit that the people who built it had probably seen a real database before, and maybe it was suitable for some non-business-critical uses where Oracle's licensing was cost-prohibitive. That left an impression on me and developers around me such that later, when we were in positions to choose databases for projects, we felt much safer going with Postgresql than with MySQL.

2. is what pushed most people over to PostgreSQL. That was the main impetus. Fortunate that, as MySQL is utter garbage, having silently corrupted data for a very long time, not being ANSI SQL compliant for a very long time, and the developers being unable to come up with one unified storage engine to handle many different loads efficiently, like Oracle can.

I was not one of those people though, but lucky enough to have had PostgreSQL running on DEC Alpha and GNU/Linux (Red Hat) as the core tool for the relational database course while I was getting my degree in computer science / information technology. A whole semester spent at the psql prompt doing SQL and programming the web application talking to it in PHP. That was back in the 20th century.

4 oracle changing licensing to be more hostile toward virtualization, right around at VMware peak

5. Postgres having a greater feature set than Oracle (ie schemas not tied to users, for example), a perfect implementation of SQL92 norm, being consistent, and easy to install, while Oracle being a hell to install followed by Oracle playing the lawyer game to threaten companies…

PostgreSQL still doesn't have nowhere near the features of Oracle: for example, it still cannot do synchronous multimaster replication, unless one buys Vertica.

I believe the parent didn't mean the Oracle DB but Oracle MySQL. This makes the most sense as Oracle's acquisition of MySQL (Sun) was discussed before.

The described issues fit better to Oracle DB. Schemas tied to users is definitely the case for Oracle DB and MySQL isn't that hard to install.

for sure, PostgreSQL is feature complete as Oracle, however it is the best open source db that is close enough. And not everyone needs multi-master replication or automated materialize view, etc. Many feature in Oracle can be build custom via functions and store procedures in Postgres.

Amazon RDS was MySQL first, so was Aurora.

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