Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

A good read. I'm working on a relatively large project now, written in Node (whee), and I was considering going full-koolaid with Mongo. I think I may stick to MySQL.

View on HN

Give PostgreSQL a shot if you're still considering databases.

I love Postgres, but I'm building something for OSS use and most unzip-and-deploy devs don't know how to set up Postgres.

Any additional information that you might be able to give me that might convince me?

Ah. If your target is people who aren't going to be reading docs, I don't think any DB is really preferable. :)

Any more details about the project, or is it under wraps?

It's basically a simple blogging platform, going to be released OSS.

Most devs know how to get MySQL running without too much thought, but many don't even know what Postgres is.

It might be worthwhile educating them. It shouldn't be that much harder to show them how to setup Postgres than MySQL :-)

If it's only a simple blogging platform, it might well be that MySQL will do the job just fine though.

I'd look into Postgres more first. They have some features that give you some of the convenience of a document DB. I'm not an expert but from what I've heard stuff like JSON/XML tables and customized column types that can store things like arrays and other structured data instead of just scalar data.

It sounds pretty powerful and I've been told it is rock solid. That being said, don't buy into the anti-mongo hype so easily either. It's been overstated and for a large portion of the middle-ground on scalability and performance mongo is great.

Well with Postgres you can include an installation in your distribution, with MySQL you cannot.

Its not difficult to setup - included in most package managers; EnterpriseDB produces installers for desktops / workstations; a straightforward build process from source.

The perceived "ease" at which MySQL is available, thus a lack of actual understanding about how to work with an RDBMS, is why MySQL is so widespread yet such a maligned platform.

It's not ready for primetime in DBs that require a great deal of relational mapping. Best cases are apps with very compartmentalized documents, a more robust caching server or something that doesn't require a lot of cross model mapping.

We found out the hard way with our app, with which we wanted to do a lot of associating and joining of information. You either get locked into the document, or locked into writing interpretive code, and neither case is fun to work around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com