When did Postgres become cool? • Hacker News Board

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#131

Post by JohnBooty » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 2:19 AM UTC

When Oracle bought MySQL, developers really started looking hard at Postgres.

MySQL developers peeking over the fence at Postgres realized their database lagged way behind Postgres when it came to transactional DDL statements, window functions, basically most modern SQL stuff. MySQL was just sloppy from a developer's perspective... weird nonstandard SQL RDBMS behavior in places.

I've heard that MySQL has made nice strides in recent years. Cool, I guess. Not really trying to tie my future to Oracle.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#132

Post by xxxxxxxx » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 2:23 AM UTC

I remember back in the day when Ingress was the cool kid (running on HP-UX at our shop I think). Almost overnight there was a fork in the road and everyone went to either Orcale or SQL Server. Now I would touch anything other then Postgres. The more I use and learn about it the more I appreciate all the work that has gone into it over the years.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#133

Post by bastawhiz » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 2:48 AM UTC

charcircuit wrote: post #127

bastawhiz wrote: post #125

I'll argue that it was Heroku that made Postgres popular. It was easy and simple to get set up, and it pretty much just worked. It was the first time I'd used it, and the first place many of my friends and coworkers had used it. Heroku was "mediatemple for apps built in the 2010s" and Postgres being the default (and really only sql option outside the marketplace) was a huge win for Postgres. Edit: I also think emoji…

Why care that utf8 isn't utfmb4? Just use the defaults and you will get utfmb4.

"utf8" doesn't support four-byte characters from UTF-8. If you use it and instead mean "utf8mb4" (which was historically not the default), data would be silently truncated (with a warning, but who queries for MySQL warnings?) and lead to all sorts of weird production issues. For many years this was the case until "utf8mb4" was made the default in 2017. Which is to say, Unicode was broken by default in MySQL until just over five years ago.

The "mb4" stands for "multi byte 4".

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#134

Post by Klonoar » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 2:52 AM UTC

booleanbetrayal wrote: post #123

The only correct answer to this question is 2012-09-10, the PostgreSQL 9.2 release date. In that release they unveiled JSON datatypes, and developers were able to have their cake and eat it too. https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-92-released... https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...

Arguably it’s really when they did jsonb, but otherwise I actually agree with you.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#135

Post by sgarland » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

chasil wrote: post #107

sgarland wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does any MySQL variant have a page like this? https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html

Not AFAIK, but SQLite is extremely special.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#136

Post by TOMDM » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:08 AM UTC

bettercallsalad wrote: post #102

One thing that made me slightly iffy in one of the usecases Postgres would be a no brainer is the need to vacuum for dead tuples. I was quite sketched by it and instead opted for traditional NoSQL stack. I wonder how people with large volumes of UPSERTs deal with vacuuming, isn’t it a huge operational burden?

Come on man I'm not even 30, I'm way too young to be made to feel old by people saying "traditional NoSQL stack".

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#137

Post by TOMDM » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:10 AM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #117

:planet: :gun:

For the curious, this is a reference to the "always has been" meme format

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#138

Post by lbotos » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:12 AM UTC

booleanbetrayal wrote: post #123

The only correct answer to this question is 2012-09-10, the PostgreSQL 9.2 release date. In that release they unveiled JSON datatypes, and developers were able to have their cake and eat it too. https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-92-released... https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...

It's funny because I was going to say circa 2012. Working at Linode I definitely saw a shift away from MySQL to Postgres around that time, but I didn't have any over arching reason beyond "it was trendy."

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#139

Post by schmookeeg » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:15 AM UTC

sdsd wrote: post #44

When MySQL was purchased by Oracle. For a time, MariaDB was the new option, but its commitment to binary compatibility with MySQL made it feel bogged down. Fun fact: Julian Assange contributed code to PostgreSQL a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464671

This is exactly when I tried pgsql for the first time and never looked back.

Re: When did Postgres become cool?

#140

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 10, 2023, 3:17 AM UTC

fcatalan wrote: post #13

I run Postgres since about 2016. I used to run MySQL behind the same frontend app. I barely know anything about Postgres beyond installation for our use case, backup and recover. I used to know loads about obscure MySQL optimization techniques, fixing broken tables, fiddling with scary parameters and recovering from hair raising situations. I like my current state of ignorance.

[deleted]