I picked PostgreSQL over MySQL for a project I did in 2005.
I picked it since the project would benefit from many advantages which PostgreSQL already had over MySQL, and it would not particularly benefit from MySQL’s only often-touted advantage, speed. This turned out to be the correct choice, and this has not changed since.
When did Postgres become cool?
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Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#22I picked PostgreSQL over MySQL for a project I did in 2005. I picked it since the project would benefit from many advantages which PostgreSQL already had over MySQL, and it would not particularly benefit from MySQL’s only often-touted advantage, speed. This turned out to be the correct choice, and this has not changed since.
why?
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#23Josh Berkus had a great talk on the history of Postgres forks and variants. Link below to slides from a version of this talk in 2009: https://www.slideshare.net/pgconf/elephant-roads-a-tour-of-p...
I think a version of the same talk was done at FOSDEM that year, and I remember it being very interesting!
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#24When I started working with Rails in 2008 having come from PHP, both communities were pretty squarely in the MySQL camp by default. That changed quickly over the following couple of years however. As I recall, the free Heroku Postgres offering had a huge influence.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#25I picked PostgreSQL over MySQL for a project I did in 2005. I picked it since the project would benefit from many advantages which PostgreSQL already had over MySQL, and it would not particularly benefit from MySQL’s only often-touted advantage, speed. This turned out to be the correct choice, and this has not changed since.
why?
The project did not need to be particularly fast, which was the only touted advantage which MySQL had at the time. In all other respects, PostgreSQL was the clear winner. (I edited my original post to be more clear.)
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#26Postgres became cool when the scales fell off peoples eyes and they realized that very few use cases necessitate or even benefit from "NoSQL" databases.
It was way before that - it was when people got fed up with the string handling and implicit type casting stupidity of MySQL
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#27Postgres has been cool since the early 2000s. SQLite is even cooler.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#28i used mysql for almost 20 years, since 3.23 and in the last 4 years i am exclusively using postgres (because of the hype and i thought i am missing out), and its not my cup of tea.
i just love mysql's hackable storage engine (particularly the new lsmt engines), and i hate toast so much, not to mention the permission system which is so convoluted and it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot. and of course it does not play nice with low iops ebs.
its too expensive to migrate from pg now, but i would avoid it in the future
i usually dont use super sophisticated sql, so mysql is actually pretty good for me considering i can tune the knobs on some tables pretty well.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#29I remember going to a general community-run tech conference in Vienna in 2002 and there was a talk on PostgreSQL which I'd never heard of at that point (had been using MySQL and Oracle). The person giving the talk was a nerd and quite enthusiastic, and quite sad that PostgreSQL wasn't more popular. Come to think of it, I guess that person is happy now :)
So I would say it was already "cool" at that point (albeit not in wide use, at least in my circles).
We weren't too happy with Oracle (pricing), and we'd only moved to that after being unhappy with MySQL in 2000 (no transactions!). I think PostgreSQL would have been a good choice for us, and I did give it a try, but migrating all the data out of Oracle just didn't really seem possible (Oracle didn't provide great export tools as you can imagine, and a "SELECT col1 || "," || col2 .." type of thing to produce a CSV would have taken hours per table and we had a few dozen tables, so would have either resulted in days of downtime, or some funky logic with a lookup table to say which database a user was in and moving them over one-by-one, but then what about FKs? what about a "messages" table where one user sends a message to another? etc. So on Oracle we stayed until the end of the product around 2012.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#30When shopping for an open source SQL database, cool is not the first thing in your mind. You are looking for familiarity, compatibility, reliability, viability etc etc, lots of -ity words that are decidedly uncool but, ahem, realy important.
What made postgres "cool" for me was the realisation that you get more than what you bargain for:
> More than "just a database", it's a data platform
This feeling of being also relevant for the evolving world of data engineerimg comes from noSQL functionality like JSON support and also extensions that allow graph operations.
So postgres is cool because it is a reliable workhorse that wont let you down but its codebase and community have also the DNA of a racehorse that can win an occasional race for you.
What else can you ask of a horse? :-)