I thought it was more to do with Github is based on Rails, and MySQl is the default choice.
Yes, I really wish DHH and the Basecamp team would move to Postgre , therefore moving the community to it.
Yes, I really wish DHH and the Basecamp team would move to Postgre , therefore moving the community to it.
In October 2013, NewRelic reported that 53% of their customers are using PostgreSQL: http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/10/10/infographic-state-stack-...
In July 2014, Planet Argon's Rails survey showed a surge in preference for PostgreSQL since 2012: http://rails-hosting.com/Results/2014/index.html#Database
Neither captures the distribution of usage from small- to large-scale apps, but it does look like the community has already moved both in mindshare and number of production deployments. I'd wager that Heroku's PostgreSQL default is responsible for much of that.
If you're picking up a framework, do you use the default database or try to do something non-default on top of what you're already learning?
Really? Defaults are supposed to be sane and the best-fit-for-most-common-scenarios... so it's a little patronizing to automatically assume your project is just so special that defaults are not good enough.
Defaults should be good enough until they have been proven to not be good enough. Don't over-engineer your project.