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Comment by 1123581321 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who chose MySQL and provides direction to developers who really like Postgres, and who also uses Postgres for fun, I do find myself having to both defend MySQL as a prudent option and convince them that I know anything at all about Postgres or computer science. :)

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I've heard MySQL (well, MariaDB, really) has improved a lot in recent years, but I still can't imagine why I'd ever choose it over Postgres for a professional project. Is there any reason?

It used to be that bargain basement shared-hosting providers would only give you a LAMP stack, so it was MySQL or nothing. But if you're on RDS, Postgres every time for my money.

mysql's admin tools are still far superior than what's available for postgres

What tools are these? Curious as a Postgres user

MySQL Workbench is actually pretty damn good.

As a PostgreSQL user. Pgadmin 4 is the worst.

PgAdmin3 was much better, but then they decided to turn it into a web application and we got PgAdmin4 Very annoying.

I used to use PgAdmin 3, but after... I donno how many years now, the PgAdmin4 is still a buggy mess.

It's really sad because all the contributors to Postgres have made an AMAZING database that's such a joy to work with. And then there's PgAdmin4 where its almost like they just don't care...

I don't feel I'm smart enough to contribute anything to PgAdmin4 to try make it better. So I stick to DataGrip and DBeaver.

I spent a little time in it and I really like DBeaver. Free tier works great.

I've probably tried a dozen or so.

For MySQL, I haven't found anything that beats SequelPro. For Postgres, I haven't found anything that comes close to parity, but my favorite is Postico.

I know people that swear by IntelliJ for their db stuff, it just never hit home for me personally though.

TablePlus is fantastic and supports all the most popular DB’s, including Postgres & MySQL. https://tableplus.com/

It’s the only DB client that doesn’t look like it was built in the 90’s. Slick UX & UI. Nice balance between developer tool & admin tool

For PG - DBeaver do a damn good job for me.

DBeaver is certainly underhyped. Moved over to using it from MySQL Workbench and so far it's been a big improvement.

I can't compare against SequelPro as I don't have a Mac, but DBeaver's worth a try for anyone looking for a cross platform DB editor

I tend to find people who argue with me against MySQL bring up things that haven't been true in a long time such as Unicode or NULL handling.

I'd probably choose Postgres over MySQL for a new project just to have the improved JSON support, but there's upsides to MySQL too:

- Per-thread vs per-process connection handling

- Ease of getting replication running

- Ability to use alternate engines such as MyRocks

MySQL also has great JSON features (json data type, virtual indexes onnit, multi-value (array) indexes, json_table, ....)

I'd be impressed if these were better than PostgreSQL's JSON features. Do you know how they compare?

2 years ago, they were worse, from what I recall.

MySQL has definitely improved a lot since 5.0 but it still had a few warts.

MyRocks is a little bit janky in my experience - it doesn't support some transaction isolation levels, fails to handle some workloads that rely on locking (such as a job queue), has failed to upgrade MariaDB minor versions [0], has very sparse documentation, and overall has given me some amount of unexpected behavior.

Though I'm willing to put up with it due to its incredible compression capabilities...

[0]: https://jira.mariadb.org/browse/MDEV-22609

Does MySQL have transactional DDL yet? Because if not, it is not a contender as a primary datastore.

Does that mean they fixed “utf-8” or that everyone is just supposed to know that it’s fucking bullshit and always has been?

You can’t cut corners like that without inviting questionS about the character of the primary committers. The pecking order in software is about trust.

People don’t let that stuff go easily, which is why you still see people harping on MongoDB. Once someone is labeled a liar And a cheat, everything they say that doesn’t add up is “guilty until proven innocent.”

The utf-8 situation is on top of a bed of half truths. Things like publishing benchmarks with backends that don’t support isolation. A cornerstone of a good DB is handling concurrent access efficiently and correctly. Drawing attention to other benchmarks is a lie by omission. Better than just being incorrect for a decade, certainly, but still sketchy.

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