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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

1. For small databases (up to a few GB) my personal preference in the past 5 years was MS SQL (Express Edition, free), then PostgreSQL and last is MySQL. That means the answer to your specific question, PostgreSQL. Why? That is the order of features, ease of use and performance in my experience, other people may have seen different.

For larger databases I have no experience with either PostgreSQL or MySQL, I was spoiled to use MS SQL for up to Terabyte size and that's the largest I've ever worked with.

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MS SQL Server definitely has some important features that are missing from PG. Top on that list IMO is real stored procedures that can return multiple heterogeneous result-sets with simple select statements. Another big one is client side tools. Query optimization and schema flexibility (being able to alter things instead of dropping in re-creating) might still be not as good in PG as well.

You won’t get a ton of agreement from this crowd though, despite the majority of them probably never having used it.

Only this is not a way to select a DBMS. PostgreSQL adds important features much faster than competitors, it is free and much leaner and more flexible.

Free and leaner, yes. More flexible? That’s debatable. As I pointed out, it’s certainly not more flexible when it come to returning multiple result-sets from a single procedure.

I think that PG actually did just add a feature called stored procedures though. So maybe soon for returning multiple heterogeneous selects! It’s one feature that I’ve been waiting a long time for…

I chose SQL Server in many cases for it’s very high quality, support, superior ease of use and flexibility. Free and leaner weren’t very high on my list comparatively. You think those are the best characteristics to go by?

MS SQL Express Edition is also free and arguably more advanced than the free competition, I don't know a single way PostgreSQL is better. That does not make PostgreSQL bad at all, especially when you go beyond the limit of free MS SQL (10 GB per database) then PostgreSQL is my first choice.

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