Ask HN: Is PostgreSQL better than MySQL?

No, not really. All else being equal:

I'd say that today, it's much muddier than it was maybe ten years ago, before the data science explosion and cloud explosion.

That is, turn-key cloud Postgres is not Y2K Postgres, and MySQL post-Maria is not Y2K MySQL. In the former, administration of Postgres has gotten much easier since Heroku got involved and Andy Pavlo started talking about self-driving databases. In the latter, MySQL can do text search well enough that I sat pair programming this with a young engineer around 2016-2017 when I'd have argued prior that you were wasting your time.

In the end, it probably comes down to how you rank your requirements:

usability, performance, suitability for a particular purpose.

Things like postgis and pgrouting may have little equal, so like others, those can be huge differentiators if you need them and see the advantage in db backend computation without invoking the N+1 query problem in aggregate.

I'm biased since I used MySQL before the inefficient backend was deprecated and I used PostgreSQL to do all manner of experimental EAV implementations using bjson including various forms of tuples from Rich Hickey.

All hail Stonebraker.

> Writing 512 byte blobs as separate transactions, in WAL mode with synchronous=normal3, temp_store=memory, and mmap enabled, I got 13.78μs per write, or ~72,568 writes per second.

MariaDB/MySQL's replication is also streamed. It's a continuous stream of replication data over an unbroken connection, for both statement-based and row-based methodologies. The only difference is that Postgres has since long been able to break transactions up into smaller pieces and apply them piecemeal, which is something that didn't show up in MariaDB/MySQL camp until a few years ago when introduced in Galera.

Coming from Oracle, I've been able to use PostgreSQL pretty much as though it were Oracle, including Oracle's optimistic locking strategy. Some of the SQL functions are a little different, but it seems the underlying philosophy is the same. In other words, PostgreSQL seems like Oracle, just a little different.

MySQL has always felt completely foreign to me. Depending on your background and familiarity with other RDBMS's though, you may be right at home with it. Wouldn't be a bit surprised if someone had a similar anecdote to mine replacing PostgreSQL with MySQL and Oracle with SQL Server.

If you don't have a personal preference for either system then do some benchmarking on the platform you'll be running them on and the loads you're expecting and see if either particularly excels over the other for what you're intending to do.