Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL • Hacker News Board

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#31

Post by tracker1 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:04 AM UTC

0942v8653 wrote: post #22

nchelluri wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what, about two weeks ago I was starting a new Rails hobby project, and I thought "all I've heard about for the past year is how everyone loves Postgres", and was about to throw it in there, when I saw a link to Google search trends comparing the two, and MySQL is still so far ahead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=mysql,+postgr... It's quite possible this is just due to people supporting exis…

It seems weird to me that Postgres and MySQL are both going down. I'd expect interest in Postgres to be rising at the very least—what are people switching to?

Probably hosted SaaS offernings, some of which may actually be Postgres and MySQL... just there's less need for queries about operations issues.

There's also a lot of NoSQL solutions that are being ever more widely used. Most of which have much lower costs for HA early on.

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#32

Post by latenightcoding » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:05 AM UTC

In some cases using shiny new things does give you some type of advantage over bigger companies that are not willing to take the risk. That being said, when it comes to choosing a database developers should stick to mature technology with a non-restrictive license aka Postgres

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#33

Post by tracker1 » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:07 AM UTC

no1youknowz wrote: post #14

How big is the team over at pinterest managing the MySQL infrastructure? I think this is the big difference here. I have a particular project. The database has well over 1 billion rows in multiple tables which need joins to generate complex reporting. As the only tech here, there is only so much I can be working on. Before... time spent on trying to get MySQL to work, was time not well spent. I spent countless hours…

Depending on your reporting needs, or data shaping, you may be better off doing rolling exports, or additional reporting to a Hadoop or ElasticSearch setup for your reporting... Especially since reports are pretty much snapshots in time, not real time... no need to slow down the server for other users.

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#34

Post by kawera » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:08 AM UTC

nchelluri wrote: post #19

philliphaydon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone in 2015 would pick mysql when postgres is an option. Live postgres. So nice to work with. It's json support is amazing too

You know what, about two weeks ago I was starting a new Rails hobby project, and I thought "all I've heard about for the past year is how everyone loves Postgres", and was about to throw it in there, when I saw a link to Google search trends comparing the two, and MySQL is still so far ahead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=mysql,+postgr... It's quite possible this is just due to people supporting exis…

One of the reasons MySQL is still popular is Wordpress.

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#35

Post by akurilin » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:10 AM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #28

dpratt wrote: post #5

I agree, I've found through painful experience that the shiny and new, while incredibly fun, tends to cost more than it's worth. With that said, if you're going to take the prudent route and use an established database platform, why in the name of all that is holy would you pick MySQL over Postgres? Granted, I am rather biased, but I do have extensive experience using both in anger. Every time I have to use MySQL I w…

mySQL has more baked in solutions for replication that don't require a support contract or a convoluted mess of choosing between half a dozen half baked options for higher availability? Honestly, it's the one area that I feel that open-source PostgreSQL is really lacking, and that is a good replication/automagic-failover story. I think MS-SQL is probably the best (but almost as expensive as EnterpriseDB support contr…

As someone who took a stab at automating slony deployment and configuration, I have to agree that the replication situation is not quite there yet. There are maybe 2-3 examples online on how to use some of those tools, and maybe half a dozen people who actually would be able to answer questions about them. Betting your business's scaling future on that kind of tooling is terrifying.

Would be great to have both out of the box failover (you can get that in RDS nowadays) and logical replication. I suppose the latter can stave off the need for sharding for a while.

I believe there's work happening for UDR/BDR right now that will be in the product by 9.5 or 9.6

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#36

Post by chadcatlett » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:13 AM UTC

no1youknowz wrote: post #14

How big is the team over at pinterest managing the MySQL infrastructure? I think this is the big difference here. I have a particular project. The database has well over 1 billion rows in multiple tables which need joins to generate complex reporting. As the only tech here, there is only so much I can be working on. Before... time spent on trying to get MySQL to work, was time not well spent. I spent countless hours…

Instagram used/uses PostgreSQL http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sha...

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#37

Post by famousactress » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:20 AM UTC

I haven't used Java in a while, but does Oracle still run around extorting folks for using the JDBC license? I'm curious.

Frankly I don't have any really serious problem with mysql other than it's ownership and speed of improvement. Plausibly MariaDB sorts that out but I agree with other commenters that at this point Postgres seems like the best choice for most new projects.

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#38

Post by kyllo » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:26 AM UTC

inanutshellus wrote: post #4

A couple years ago I built a very robust and intricate virtual inventory system for integrating with third-party vendors. I created two accessible endpoints: one highly customizeable webservice endpoint (I'll literally take any valid XML and work with you to transform it into what I need), and one luddite-friendly SFTP server supporting extraordinarily simple export-from-excel XML output. I was raked over the coals f…

I work a Fortune 500 company in an industry where FTP and EDI are the norm, and SOAP/XML is considered fancy. Half the time our customers (many of whom are other F500 companies) think that all that stuff is too hard or expensive, and prefer to just e-mail us an Excel spreadsheet every day. Enough so that we recently introduced a new service offering where a customer can e-mail their spreadsheet of data to one of our employees, who will upload it to our system for them once a week.

This is just how IT works in most businesses.

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#39

Post by UnoriginalGuy » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:32 AM UTC

cageface wrote: post #27

philliphaydon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why anyone in 2015 would pick mysql when postgres is an option. Live postgres. So nice to work with. It's json support is amazing too

Agreed. I consider MySQL a red flag and avoid any projects or teams that choose it over Postgres. Postgres is reliable, flexible, fast, and well documented. It's one of the crowning achievements of the open source world.

> I consider MySQL a red flag and avoid any projects or teams that choose it over Postgres.

I am in the "pro Postgres" camp, but this attitude is too black and white for me. For many projects Postgres in superior to MySQL, but there are situations and requirements where MySQL makes a lot more sense.

For just one example, I can get MySQL as a service much cheaper and easier than I can get Postgres as a service. Which isn't to say Postgres as a service doesn't exist (it does), just to say MySQL is more readily available and there is more competition in that sector.

Additional if I had a DBA who was a MySQL expert and didn't know a thing about Postgres, I'd go with MySQL for my project. Since a good DBA is worth their weight in gold, and an expert in a particular DBMS can be a massive asset to a project.

But given no restrictions or needs, I'd pick Postgres as my "default" choice. I just don't think it is right to say you'd avoid a team/project just because they picked MySQL, sometimes there are completely legit reasons (or politics).

Re: Learn to stop using shiny new things and love MySQL

#40

Post by spudlyo » Sat, Oct 10, 2015, 3:35 AM UTC

clessg wrote: post #24

nchelluri wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what, about two weeks ago I was starting a new Rails hobby project, and I thought "all I've heard about for the past year is how everyone loves Postgres", and was about to throw it in there, when I saw a link to Google search trends comparing the two, and MySQL is still so far ahead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=mysql,+postgr... It's quite possible this is just due to people supporting exis…

MySQL is popular because it's easy to use (in the same sense as PHP), easy to setup, and has a lot of tutorials written for it. Also speed used to be a pretty big factor, but that was only because MyISAM took shortcuts with data consistency. If you care about your data and would rather not deal with the many problems MySQL inevitably brings, then Postgres is the better option. I can't say I've seen many compelling re…

That may be why MySQL is popular for small installations, but that's not why it's popular with companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Pinterest who run replicated clusters that number in the thousands.

It's popular at scale because unlike Postgres, it has replication that is well understood, is reliable, and isn't a massive pain in the ass to operate.