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When did Postgres become cool?

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Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#91

Post by fragmede »

thepostman0 wrote: post #89
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.

Where do you see people shifting to?

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#92

Post by chx »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #55
weinzierl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The last straw was when Oracle bought MySQL, and it was forked to MariaSQL. Postgres went from the nerdy awkward kid to the nerdy cool kid, while MySQL started drinking, getting split personalities, and living off his past fame.

I think even Sun buying MySQL already hurt MySQL and helped PostgreSQL.

Back in 2006, the startup I was with moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL because the support we were able to find was both expensive (300 USD/hr) and not satisfactory. Back then MySQL AB (this was before Sun) gave us a 10K two year deal on three servers and they had excellent response times and knowledgeable support.

For PostgreSQL the year 2010 when Salesforce bought Heroku (big plus) and Oracle bought MySQL (big minus for MySQL so indirect big plus to PostgreSQL) was the breakthrough, I would say.

That MySQL didn't get CTE and window functions until 2018 is a sad joke.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#93

Post by code_runner »

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).

I came from a MSSQL background and eventually worked on an MySQL project with somebody who had a TON of MySQL experience by way of symfony.

I was explaining that not all of his non-aggregated columns were in his group by, so his query wasn't going to work.... but what do you know, MySQL will just return whatever it feels like from the group in that situation. I expected it not to run at all.

I think there are some flags etc you can use to enable to stricter behavior but it was one of the wildest footguns I've ever seen.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#94

Post by water9 »

Postgres for a long time was the leader in doing geospatial calculations thanks to postgis. It became popular with the rise of apps like uber and doordash because it had better support for geospatial calculations required to make decisions on how to allocate drivers to users around town and deal with surges.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#96

Post by lsaferite »

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

One of mine is the lack of transactional DDL.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#97

Post by HideousKojima »

thepostman0 wrote: post #89
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.

WSL 1 was cool because it was basically reverse Wine, but yeah WSL2 is basically a wrapper over a VM

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#98

Post by tete »

> Postgres wasn't always the cool kid. It didn't emerge from millions of dollars of VC funding

Hahaha, a thing that is cool and emerges from millions of dollars of VC funding. Hahahaha

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#100

Post by kevstev »

If you were paying attention, postgres always the better option, based on my experience starting around 2002 or so. MySQL had the better marketing in its name and was arguably a bit easier to get going from the start, but postgres was always more advanced and IMHO once you got past the most basic usage made a lot more sense in how it's configured.

The fact that it was the M in the LAMP stack gave it a huge edge too. What was at one point an all day, if not multiday setup and configuration process became a simple install script once LAMP became a thing.

MySql was the "default" for a long time until Oracle muddied the waters just enough to make devs look around a bit.

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