Frankly, no; I've used all of Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL, and SQLite, and MySQL is the worst of the lot. No, PostgreSQL isn't a holy grain, but any user of MySQL would overall be better served by PostgreSQL;
especially on AWS where the replication is so simple to set up, which IMO is the only good argument I've heard in favor of MySQL (but I hear even
that is fraught with peril).
MySQL is so completely riddled with bugs and utterly baffling behavior — it is the PHP of relational DBs. What I remember off the top of my head includes attempting to subtract datetimes causing the punctuation to be removed from the datetimes and the resulting "integers" to be subtracted, FK integrity being violated in a number of easy-to-hit corner cases, the "utf8" encoding not being able to encode UTF-8 (and the default being latin1…), GROUP BY allowing obviously (i.e., catchable to the parser) broken queries, `SELECT * FROM table` on Thus far the only other tool I've seen come close to this level of insanity is MongoDB. The thing about a tool so willfully discards any sort of reasoned approach to its topic area is that the people who use it — who inevitably are not well versed in how a relational database works "in theory" — cannot derive from its behavior its rules, because its behavior is irrational, bordering on psychotic, and the people using it tweak query after query while having no understanding of why one query might work better until some abomination that someone usually works is crafted; `-- Don't touch`. A good tool — I believe, somewhere deep inside me — will teach the novice user. MySQL will not; it will drive you insane.
[1]: http://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else