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Comment by rufugee | Hacker News Reader

I really have a hard time taking him seriously. As someone who's been a heavy user of both databases in the past, IMO the only thing MySQL has done better than PostgreSQL is in the marketing department. PostgreSQL has no concerted marketing effort. PostgreSQL is not a company with a marketing budget...it's a community of peers and db geeks getting things done.

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I think MySQL's edge is just that is was initially perceived to be simpler to set up. Perhaps that is true or not, but the perception was created. The result was a massive head start. You now have a huge pool of users, support and knowledge, which makes it a safe choice. (notice I say safe, not necessarily the best)

Outside of the startup community developers don't have such a great appetite for risk, especially with their data.

I'm one of those people - I just know My SQL better. It has nothing to do with ease of installation or building queries. It has to do with troubleshooting. I know how to tune MySQL and troubleshoot. I know how to install and use other systems but it introduces risk for me to put them into production without a very compelling reason.

I would happily use another system if there were a db admin to take responsibility for running the server. In fact my favorite db is Oracle, but I have no experience as DB admin on that platform.

I can say that postgres made overblown claims for their products in the late 90's. They'd use FUD to scare people away from MySQL, but two times I had a "Dude Where's my Data" experience with PostgreSQL which sent me back to MySQL.

I was involved with one project with PostgresSQL that was successful around 2005. I did 5 "shootouts" of DBMS alternatives that considered PostgresSQL and other products for various projects and despite having some attractive features, PostgresSQL always lost out. For instance, in mysql I was able to create indexes that could handle Freebase text fields without any "impeadance mismatch and it wasn't clear how to do it with pgsql.

MySQL is easier to install, much simpler to use, easier to manage and most importantly every little issue has been solved online many, many times over. It's a known quantity.

Fact is that simplicity is more important than features for most people.

Installation? All modern Linuxes have package managers that make installation a headache of the past.

Configuration is a different story. When you are done with a Postgres config you have a more secure setup. They don't allow you to shoot yourself in the foot by default.

Honestly, installation as a differentiator between databases is a seriously weak argument. If you're going to troll pick something a little more technical like acid compliance or something else that nobody seems to care about.

You don't like my argument so I am trolling ? Nice.

And you ignored Windows, Mac as well as the huge number of LAMP based installers. Being able to quickly get the entire stack up and running very much helped the popularity of MySQL.

You keep saying this, but in my recent experience, postgres had been fantastically easy to get up and running on both Windows and Linux (debian and ubuntu to be precise. don't know about Mac). So this argument only applies possibly to its distant past. It's simply not relevant now. It's worth keeping an open mind.

I agree with you on the development setup. Production setup is about the same.

Meant no offense. Seemed trollish but when you factor in development setup then yes MySQL is slightly easier. I think heroku is doing a good job making Postgres a snap.

Regarding installation and ease of use, can you be more specific? I see this complaint frequently but, as a postgresql user, it's hard for me to see where the difficulty for new users is and what should be done about it.

Installation of PostgreSQL are in my experience no harder than for MySQL. As for management and usage I would say PostgreSQL is simpler because it has a much better command line with excellent error messages and good tab completion. The backslash commands of psql are a bit confusing at first, but so are MySQL's SHOW commands and once you get used to the backslash commands they are very powerful.

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