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Comment by taligent | Hacker News Reader

Easy of setup matters. Because unless you are using a hosted database then you will be managing and maintaing that database day to day. Which is why I would never recommend PostgreSQL for startups. It is far, far too convoluted for many of the basic tasks you will be doing everyday.

That's why everyone chooses MySQL as a relational database. It is easy to setup, easy to maintain and EVERY problem has been solved and searchable online.

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Wait... what?! I don't see any major differences between MySQL and PostgreSQL in terms of setup/maintenance. They have slightly different authorization styles, but Postgres can be configured to behave just like mysql.

Ignoring for a moment that postgres was my example, but not my point: choose what you can wrap you head around. I used postgres successfully in multiple projects an no one ever had a big problem with it. I've seen MySQL setups burning sky-high because of some Gotchas the team ran into. That doesn't make either of those bad.

The underlying issue is that (except for the most trivial cases), investing time in properly operating and using your database is a huge gain that many young companies ignore. 6 Month later, they have a burning datastore at hand that they don't know how to fix.

Exactly ALL databases will have issues. Which is why I suggested MySQL. Every issue has either been solved online or worked around in Percona, Facebook or Twitter's implementation.

There are huge benefits that come from being the most widely deployed database.

There's no good reason to use MySQL over PostGres these days.

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