Postgres became over-the-top cool for me the moment I started to realize what pg-cli could do.
When did Postgres become cool?
141–150 of 182 posts
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#142I 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.
Isn't that just more about the abundance of hardware we have these days? While on the MySQL side you had to delve into tweaking the different cache sizes and picking MyISAM or InnoDB depending on the use case, on Postgres you had to deal with stuff like manually running VACUUM at the right time or later when that arrived tweaking the autovacuum params.
These days even on my "underpowered" NAS I can just run a default docker image of my database and not worry about tweaking anything.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#143Postgres was cool. Now SQLite is cool. In a few years .INI files will be cool. Fads gonna fad.
systemd will be cool I tell you!
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
My understanding was that POSIX was added to qualify for government contracts that required a FIPS-1512 compliant OS and had little to do with their UNIX business which was taken over by SCO in 1987. My mental model is that they shed any UNIX business to focus on Windows, but then POSIX happened and they had to provide something in the market to meet the requirement.
Were this to be true, and they intended immediate death for this whole layer, then a) "Windows Services for UNIX" would never have existed, and b) the famous argument with David Korn over the quality of their port of his shell would never have happened. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://m.slashdot.org/story/16351 In any case, a "userspace personality" such as NT exhibits is not added q…
I didn’t say they intended death for the POSIX subsystem, but that it was included to satisfy requirements for government contracts. It had the obvious additional advantage of allowing UNIX software to be recompiled for Windows with minimal changes.
The Wikipedia page agrees that it was included from the beginning to satisfy government requirements - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the early 2000s, MySQL was: - way easier to install - way easier to maintain (not vacuuming, etc) - and had a replication story. So you had startups which created their MVP on some shared webhost, which had MySQL and nearly non had pg. as those startups graduated into enterprise fame, they never left MySQL but instead fixed its problems along the way.
Yeah, and MySQL was popular among PHP developers, remember LAMP installers?
IIRC, in the PHP3 / PHP4 days, the only database binding available in out-of-the-box PHP was MySQL.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#146The 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_...
MySQL added a JSON column type just 3 years later though.
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#147Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ju…
> Which is to say, Unicode was broken by default in MySQL until just over five years ago.
No, stock MySQL has never used a default character set of utf8 (utf8mb3). Prior to MySQL 8, the default character set was latin1, not utf8 (utf8m3).
"utf8" being utf8mb3 is indeed a huge foot-gun, but it isn't correct to say that "Unicode was broken by default in MySQL". utf8mb4 has been available for use since 2010 (MySQL 5.5).
As for silent truncation, that bad default was fixed in 2015 (MySQL 5.7), but the option has been available since like 2004 or 2005.
That all said, some Linux distros may apply some non-standard defaults (like changing the default charset), and ditto for cloud DBaaS products (e.g. RDS disables strict sql_mode even today in all versions).
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#149Earlier 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).
> 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.
InnoDB (MySQL's default storage engine since 2010) has always used MVCC. Its MVCC implementation is arguably better than Postgres's in some important ways, see e.g. https://ottertune.com/blog/the-part-of-postgresql-we-hate-th...
Re: When did Postgres become cool?
#150Postgres 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.
> NoSQL is as popular as it has ever been though.
Indeed. I was surprised to find that search volume is about as high as it has ever been: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=nosql&hl...