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Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

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Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#51

Post by [deleted] »

Finnucane wrote: post #44
IMTDb wrote: post #9

If your project is already on MySQL and you have no issue => Don't change anything If your project is already on MySQL and you have issues => understand the issues you are facing and make sure that moving to Postgres would fix them (99% chance it won't) If you have a new project and have very precise informations about the constraint you will face (pretty rare) => Do your research and choose what's best for your use…

Your database is one place where the old rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" should apply.

[deleted]

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#52

Post by munk-a »

Finnucane wrote: post #44
IMTDb wrote: post #9

If your project is already on MySQL and you have no issue => Don't change anything If your project is already on MySQL and you have issues => understand the issues you are facing and make sure that moving to Postgres would fix them (99% chance it won't) If you have a new project and have very precise informations about the constraint you will face (pretty rare) => Do your research and choose what's best for your use…

Your database is one place where the old rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" should apply.

I agree, for a greenfield project PostgreSQL is quite a nice option - if you're already using MySQL then probably stick with that until performance forces a change.

All that said I actually did lead a DB switch at my current gig - though it was quite a few years back when PostgreSQL had a really clear feature lead, one of the biggest quick wins was moving a terrible string field like... `1-2-3-4` over to a slightly less terrible int[] field.

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#54

Post by slig »

pmontra wrote: post #41
h1d wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about ORM? ORM is such a waste of time to learn as you switch to another language at one point, your time spent on ORM is gone and you don't even learn the underlying tech that is SQL. Stick with SQL and you can keep that skill mostly the same across different SQL products. And obviously you will sooner or later hit some performance penalty when you start writing complex ORM and ORM starts spitting ou…

I'm working at three projects with three languages and three different ORMs so you have my sympathy. They're the ORMs of Django, Rails, Phoenix. Rails' got the easiest ORM to use by far, maybe because IMHO it's now the closest to SQL. Phoenix's Ecto is needlessly complicated and Django's is as verbose as Python's libraries can get. Example: Model.objects.get(), because nobody could understand Model.get(), right? /s S…

> Example: Model.objects.get(), because nobody could understand Model.get(), right? /s

That has a simple explanation: each Model can have multiple Managers [1], and the `objects` is the default one. Also, by convention, methods on the Model are usually relative to "one DB record", and methods on the manager are relative to N records.

[1]: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/topics/db/managers/

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#55

Post by brightball »

barrkel wrote: post #50
brightball wrote: post #31

I'm a huge PG fan but switching your database on an existing project is a non-small undertaking. If you're starting from scratch, then yes, you take PG every time. There's a lot...a lot that goes into saying that and if you haven't made the jump, a lot of the reasons aren't going to seem important because you currently "don't do" the things that PG lets you do with your data. Like this: https://www.brightball.com/art…

Text column type is not where I'd advertise pg differences. Rather a much richer SQL query feature set and a smarter (though sometimes smartass) query optimizer. MySQL is dumb (though predictably dumb) and queries are single threaded, and the feature set is limited. Some queries have no efficient representation, and you need to trade off cost of materialising derived table vs repeated correlated queries.

Agreed. For sake of OP I was going with a known pain point in MySQL.

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#57

Post by halis »

Migrating from Oracle to Postgres is much more appealing because you can avoid the high Oracle license costs.

I don't really see that much benefit in converting from MySQL to Postgres.

While Postgres is a legit database, so is MySQL. If you're looking to scale MySQL, I recommend the book High Performance MySQL.

For greenfield projects I'd be comfortable with either MySQL or Postgres.

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#58

Post by zten »

luhn wrote: post #39
bitlax wrote: post #12

Here's some discussion from when Uber switched back from PostgreSQL to MySQL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12166585 FWIW I prefer PostgreSQL.

The linked article is a good dive into the internals of Postgres vs MySQL. However, Uber didn't really switch from Postgres to MySQL, they switched from Postgres to their home rolled document database which uses MySQL as the storage layer. [1] [1] https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-one/

Markus Winand's write-up at https://use-the-index-luke.com/blog/2016-07-29/on-ubers-choi... really drives this point home. InnoDB has favorable characteristics for what they're trying to do.

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#59

Post by Glyptodon »

I think if you're starting a project the amount of "gotcha" type stuff you'll hit in MySQL/Maria if you aren't already familiar with it is pretty significant compared to PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is also less fragmented, which seems to be an increasing issue with the MySQL family.

But if you're already pretty used to MySQL and it's working fine in your project already, I would only switch to PostgreSQL if you think specific features would be very worthwhile.

It might be worth comparing features. I have a project that benefits enormously in terms of reduced complexity from the PostgreSQL array types, but that's somewhat rare I think.

Other things that might be useful if you have special/specific needs are PostGIS, table inheritance (not really a huge thing), and foreign data wrappers.

But really you shouldn't switch because you "might" need one of them.

Re: Anyone made the jump from MySQL to PostreSQL? It is worth it?

#60

Post by weberc2 »

tonyarkles wrote: post #23

So there’s some nice things about Postgres, but by far the thing I miss the most when I go back to other systems (incl. MySQL/Maria) is transactional DDL. Knowing that a bad migration isn’t going to leave my DB in a half-changed fucked up state is worth it.

DDL?
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