Is it surprising that Pinterest is on MySQL? Has Postgres finally usurped the position of default DB for startups?
"Aside: I still recommend startups avoid the fancy new stuff — try really hard to just use MySQL. Trust me. I have the scars to prove it."
In many ways, Postgres is cutting edge with it's features and capabilities. I see lots of updates from Postgres that include new SQL features (json objects) - conversely I see lots of updates from MySQL that are about durability and scalability e.g. (galera cluster, percona updates etc...)
From the use case Pinterest exposed in the article, I'm not sure what the additional features of Postgres would actually buy them?
Slow ALTER
>or use a solution that enables native JSON storage
This would help if you needed to select or join on the individual columns, but if Pinterest don't need to do that, then this falls under the "avoid the fancy new stuff" quote from the article.
In practice, how often do schema migrations take place though?
It is not stuck in the stone age, yet extremely reliable. Having worked with a number of MySQL (main fork) and Postgres installations in the past 7 years I observed a number of crashes and corruptions with MySQL (not counting the glory MyISAM days) while having _none_ with Postgres.
I should confess that that experience made me very biased in favour of Postgres. My default thinking about Postgres now is: if it doesn't have something MySQL has, it is either for a reason or they are taking their time to do it the _right_ way.
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/04/22/wikipedia-adopts-mariad...