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Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

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Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#311

Post by evanelias »

0xf8 wrote: post #293
erhaetherth wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> something maybe like Git, most immediately comes to mind, as an example of the de-facto standard for distributed VCS basically since … 1995 when Linus decided to create it? hot take. might be the most popular, maybe even by a large margin, but I think you'll find a good chunk of people who have actually tried different VCSs don't think it's the best.

Yah, I think that’s probably true. But that’s also hard to reconcile with the reality of the adoption trending consistently away from any alternative and only towards Git. And “large margins” are indeed pretty objectively the case (from the largest developer surveys the breakdown 10 years ago was like 70% Git to everything, growing to ~95% in 2022). Usually the phenomenon you’re describing, leads to other alternative…

Giant companies like Google and Meta use alternatives to Git for their internal / closed-source code, because Git couldn't scale to their needs. If I recall correctly, Google transitioned from Perforce to an in-house system, and Meta transitioned from using Mercurial to a custom derivative of it.

Again, no one size fits all...

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#312

Post by evanelias »

drogus wrote: post #294
donatj wrote: post #109

Unpopular opinion on HN apparently, but MySQL - It's less featureful, and I'd consider that a strong virtue in the YAGNI camp - less to go wrong, less mental overhead. - Maintenance is simpler and far less necessary in my general experience. - Replication is simpler and more reliable. - You can tell the query optimizer what to do. When this is needed, you'll be thankful. It's a godsend. That said, I wouldn't run Orac…

> It's less featureful, and I'd consider that a strong virtue in the YAGNI camp - less to go wrong, less mental overhead. Imagine when you actually need any of the features that PostgreSQL provides like pub/sub, logical replication, JSONB etc. With MySQL you might have to hack a solution that is much more complex or you have to set up an entirely separate tool. What I find nice with PostgreSQL is that for simple case…

> features that PostgreSQL provides like [...] logical replication

MySQL has offered logical replication for considerably longer than Postgres, and it's a substantially more configurable and mature implementation. MySQL's built-in replication has always been logical replication. It's a feature MySQL has had for 23 years -- built-in logical replication is literally one of the top reasons why all the biggest MySQL users chose MySQL originally!

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#313

Post by bdcravens »

Completely tangential, but I need to do some transformations on some CSVs and decided I'd just import them into a local database, run my SQL, and export. The CSVs had the literal strings TRUE/FALSE in a column. MySQL would require me to import into a varchar column and then transform; Postgresql automatically converted it as a boolean.

Plenty of big reasons, but it's the small quality of life stuff that makes a lot of difference.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#314

Post by irrational »

evanelias wrote: post #268
stouset wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. I picked two instances that had long been personally painful with MySQL and didn’t exist when I finally fled to greener pastures. There are far more examples than just those two though. :)

Sure, and there are also plenty of examples of things MySQL can do that Postgres can't. There's no silver bullets in software or databases, no "one size fits all". Just various trade-offs between different design decisions.

What are the “plenty of examples of things MySQL can do that Postgres can’t”? I honestly can’t think of one, much less “plenty”.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#315

Post by 0xf8 »

thfuran wrote: post #308
0xf8 wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yah, I think that’s probably true. But that’s also hard to reconcile with the reality of the adoption trending consistently away from any alternative and only towards Git. And “large margins” are indeed pretty objectively the case (from the largest developer surveys the breakdown 10 years ago was like 70% Git to everything, growing to ~95% in 2022). Usually the phenomenon you’re describing, leads to other alternative…

Are you serious? Anyone who disagrees with you about what VCS is best must be intentionally contrarian?

Haha. That’s a pretty aggressive and surface level read of my comment . For starters it was mostly a joke, and explicitly a conjecture. I was saying, probably most users of a different system do so on for some reason other than, Git being objectively inferior for their purposes (and as others in the thread pointed out, the latter actual is the case at the large scale end of the spectrum for big companies concerned with scaling, not choosing Git).

Secondly, no one has disagreed with me on the matter, as I haven’t put forth a personal opinion, I’m simply impartially making referencing to the fact that Git is the de-facto standard. And from an intellectual perspective, was hoping someone might elucidate more into why that is the case, given my conception is an inferential deduction. at best).

While I’m personally relatively familiar with Git internals, by no means an expert, its the only distributed VCS I’ve ever used and I don’t know anything substantive enough about the alternatives to credibly make a relative value comparison here. They could be the bees knees for all I know, but it seems unlikely given the position Git holds as far as consensus standard choice.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#317

Post by gymbeaux »

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #105
gmac wrote: post #83

Postgres. Fast, full-featured, rock-solid, and a great community. I think many of us can’t be bothered to go over (again) the issues we’ve had with MySQL in the past. The last straw for me was about ten years ago, when I caught MySQL merrily making up nonsense results for a query I’d issued that accidentally didn’t make any sense. Very likely this particular issue, and others like it, have been fixed in the meantime.…

Having used postgres for the past decade, I tried MySQL for a side project to see whats changed with it. The sad answer is that it feels like nothing has changed - Oracle seems to have let what used to be a core technology of the industry languish. I'm sure there are use cases where MySQL will be the better choice over postgres, but the future for the stack looks bleak.

Actually I would argue that there isn’t a single reason to use MySQL over Postgres (barring the obvious- it’s what the team already knows, or the company already uses, etc.)

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#318

Post by itake »

weaksauce wrote: post #54
itake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is mysql better for quick and dirty? I feel like pg extensions offer a lot more "dirtiness" running inside pg than mysql has.

yeah that's a weird take. if you want quick and dirty you use sqlite and if you need something more you go with postgres. some replication things are nicer in mysql apparently but postgres is the better option for most workflows

Are there easy offsite backup solutions for SQLite?

The easy deploy tools (digital ocean apps, doku, beanstalk, heroku, etc) destroy the instance (losing state). You need to configure an offsite backup tool for your db or you have to manually setup a server to live forever.

Having a separate db machine is so much easier to setup and plays better with the diy tools.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#319

Post by jaachan »

throw0101b wrote: post #235
dijit wrote: post #36

There is almost no good reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL for any operational reason, I did a deep dive many moons ago (before major improvements in performance to postgres) and people were saying that MySQL was faster. I found that not to be true and the differences have only gained even more favour towards postgres. also, I assume you mean MariaDB as MySQL is owned by Oracle and I would greatly implore anyone…

> There is almost no good reason to choose MySQL over PostgreSQL for any operational reason Galera is the main one I can think of: * https://galeracluster.com/library/documentation/tech-desc-in... * https://mariadb.com/kb/en/what-is-mariadb-galera-cluster/ * https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=galera I'm not aware of any multi-master, active-active(-active) replication system that is open source for PostgreSQ…

We ran a Galera cluster for 4 days and it died on the first ALTER TABLE we did. Only option was to reduce it down to a Primary / Replica setup. I really can't recommend anyone using this.

Re: Ask HN: It's 2023, how do you choose between MySQL and Postgres?

#320

Post by gymbeaux »

irrational wrote: post #314
evanelias wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and there are also plenty of examples of things MySQL can do that Postgres can't. There's no silver bullets in software or databases, no "one size fits all". Just various trade-offs between different design decisions.

What are the “plenty of examples of things MySQL can do that Postgres can’t”? I honestly can’t think of one, much less “plenty”.

Yeah I can’t think of any. I mean if I had to come up with something, I would talk about tooling. MySQL Workbench (when it works) is by far the easiest to use and most feature-rich of all RDBMS.. MS. It runs on any OS too, which is a ding on SQL Server and not Postgres since Postgres’ is a web app- which has the limitations of a web app (no right click for example- which I know is possible in a web app, but last I checked not implemented for pgadmin).
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