The difference is not significant enough to matter for most projects, esp just starting out. Hence, I mostly choose Postgres, since I don't like Oracle as a company very much.
Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
11–20 of 366 posts
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#12By choosing SQLite.
No server process and a single file per DB which I can put wherever I like.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#13For anything involving location, choose Postgres because PostGIS is just so good.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#14Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#15MySQL for the quick and dirty and Postgres for anything else
Why is mysql better for quick and dirty? I feel like pg extensions offer a lot more "dirtiness" running inside pg than mysql has.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#16If Postgres was that much better than MySQL then you would expect to see exact reasons on why to pick it. Every comment so far has not listed any reason.
Ok, here's one: When you give MySQL invalid data, its standard behavior is to just silently store garbage in your database in many cases where PostgreSQL would've told you that your data is invalid.
MySQL's handling of unicode has also been terrible historically, with way too many foot guns, but I don't know if that may be better with recent versions.
People aren't providing strong reasons because the question wasn't "what are some objective reasons for picking one over another", but "how do you pick between them". People are simply answering the question OP asked, and a lot of people's process is simply to pick PostgreSQL.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#17Choose whichever one you/your team is more familiar with. Both are battle-tested and proven and will likely scale to whatever needs you have.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#18I dunno if this is still true but a couple of years ago MySQL was cheaper on AWS (RDS/Aurora) than Postgres.
For a typical db.t3.xlarge instance, you're talking about 29c/hour vs 27.2c per hour. That's $157.68 as the total difference for one year's runtime, when the whole instance cost for postgres would be $2540.4 for the year, or about 6%. The larger the machine, the closer to parity. Given the absolutely small difference, I hope this isn't the dividing line in any commercial project.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#19By choosing SQLite. No server process and a single file per DB which I can put wherever I like.
I like SQLite. But I really wish its default behavior wasn't to simply allow garbage data into the database. If I have an int column, don't let me accidentally store a string.
Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?
#20PostgreSQL is a community thing and MySQL is Oracle. Maybe make some basic benchmarks for comparison?