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When did Postgres become cool?

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Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#81

Post by paulddraper »

weinzierl wrote: post #50
dymk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was way before that - it was when people got fed up with the string handling and implicit type casting stupidity of MySQL

This is also my opinion and I think before that MySQL was known for fast and Postgres for features and correctness. I think the change went both ways, people realized that MySQL's casual approach only got them so far and at the same time Postgres focused more on performance without giving up its existing qualities. I think Postgres became cool when it became fast (too).

> MySQL was known for fast and Postgres for features and correctness

That's still the case.

In particular, MySQL is faster for updates (no MVCC), but that comes at a cost that I would be hesitant to pay.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#82

Post by srj »

I remember bringing a postgresql book to a sleepover when I was in high school around 2002. An IRC friend was on the pgsql advocacy mailing list and we were all obsessed.

Now were we cool? I have my doubts. We sure thought pgsql was cool though (still do!)

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#83

Post by weare138 »

dymk wrote: post #26
xnx wrote: post #18

Postgres 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

I think all the drama with Oracle acquiring MySQL may have contributed to the situation too.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#84

Post by killjoywashere »

I've been running postgres since, I think, 2008. Mainly I don't like MSFT in general (although I admit VS Code and WSL are pretty cool). I tried MySQL on my first blog and a couple projects and it just seemed too be a bit to chaotic (how many engines do you need?), then a bit too gross (post acquisition). Some of the guys I work with use MariaDB, but at this point I've met Michael Stonebraker and some hardcore postgres folks and it just feels like the right way. Plus it seems like the cloud vendors tend to support Postgres-like features (e.g. Redshift) so that seems like a hella safe bet.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#85

Post by nemo44x »

xnx wrote: post #18

Postgres became cool when the scales fell off peoples eyes and they realized that very few use cases necessitate or even benefit from "NoSQL" databases.

NoSQL is as popular as it has ever been though. Many of those most popular NoSQL DBs have outgrown the general database market for a decade and it doesn’t look to be slowing down.

Saying that, SQL databases are still the king by a wide margin. Postgres has grown more at other SQL DBs expense than anything.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#86

Post by nomel »

thewix wrote: post #57
xnx wrote: post #18

Postgres became cool when the scales fell off peoples eyes and they realized that very few use cases necessitate or even benefit from "NoSQL" databases.

You get JSON types with postgres. If you aren't sharing data between tables then json is fine

You get JSONB with postgres, which, to me, is a significant difference. This means you can indexing by key/value, access keys directly, without parsing the whole json string, etc.

For my use case, JSONB support completely killed most NoSQL solutions.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#87

Post by kragen »

in 02002–02004 i worked at a startup shipping an on-premises saas network management system (i.e., buy our appliance and install it) built on postgres, after a previous startup using mysql. even then postgres was a perfectly fine database; at the time there wasn't much reason to prefer postgres or mysql over each other unless you were running at massive scale, where even oracle couldn't hold a candle to mysql's readslaves

99% of the time i'm using a sql database it's because i don't care about cool features tho. i mean window functions and json and recursive ctes are definitely cool but my orm isn't gonna use them

the startup got bought out a couple years later, so i guess it was successful, but my options were so diluted they weren't worth much

the huge difference in my experience was going from no credible gratis sql rdbms in 01993 or so, to msql in 01994 (gratis but far from libre), to mysql in 01996 (gratis but not quite libre) and postgresql (libre!) in the fuzzy period 01996–02000. postgres didn't support sql until 01996 but for reasons i don't remember wasn't really a viable alternative to mysql until about 01999. i don't remember exactly when mysql started offering a real free-software license but i think it was maybe 02000 or 02001; the lawsuit over nusphere's infringement of mysql's gpl was 02002

maybe gumby can weigh in with his experience trying to sell people on an enhanced postgres fork supporting cross-data-center oltp at zembu (eventual-consistency-like multisite performance but without the eventual consistency, which is to say, inconsistency). other founders were ncm and ian (lance) taylor: http://web.archive.org/web/20010617143323/http://www.zembu.c...

nowadays i think sqlite is kind of the big competitor; lower write performance, higher read performance (except for very complex queries where its simple execution model is inadequate), and much lower hassle

probably all these non-column-store designs are obsolete; i'm curious whether there's a column-based sql database that offers the same degree of hassle-freeness as sqlite or even postgres

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#88

Post by sgarland »

prewett wrote: post #64

I know I made the decision in 2012 or so. The startup I was working at used Postgres for the server, and I didn't know anything about databases, so, okay, fine, whatever. Then they started an analytics team, which went with MySQL ... and ended up discovering that MySQL only handled up to 3-byte characters of UTF-8, which was a problem since the users of our game Chinese characters and lots of creative abuses of Unico…

MySQL had utf8mb4 support in 2010, but to be fair it wasn’t the default, and also depending on the row format indexing cols using it wasn’t possible.

Like everything with MySQL, there were and are endless gotchas. Once you learn most of them it’s incredibly performant (and ProxySQL in front of it is amazing, and has way more capabilities than just connection pooling), but it’s definitely full of footguns.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#89

Post by thepostman0 »

killjoywashere wrote: post #84

I've been running postgres since, I think, 2008. Mainly I don't like MSFT in general (although I admit VS Code and WSL are pretty cool). I tried MySQL on my first blog and a couple projects and it just seemed too be a bit to chaotic (how many engines do you need?), then a bit too gross (post acquisition). Some of the guys I work with use MariaDB, but at this point I've met Michael Stonebraker and some hardcore postgr…

Hey, unrelated to DBs, but my view is WSL is boring, seems a VM with mounts, but wine feels much cooler.

Interesting view with cloud vendors, there does seem to be a shift from traditional LAMP stack.

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