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Comment by kahawe | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible HN has a very strong bias on web developers? Because in "serious business" or at least in my case in finance, you almost always find Oracle and DB2 being the leading DBs and maybe Sybase and maybe-maybe mysql or mssql but hardly ever postgre no matter how awesome it is and definitely never-ever something hip and cool and latest-fashion/fad like Mongo or Couch.

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At the very least, I'd say it has a bias towards younger/smaller companies for whom the price point of Oracle/DB2 doesn't make sense.

As a younger/smaller companies, I wouldn't use Oracle/DB2 even if it was free. Happy mongodb user here.

As someone who has worked in young, small and medium, old and larger companies: I wouldn't use mongo/couch outside of non-critical webapps even if I was paid to do so and for my own (cynic) understanding, it is as much a "database" as a folder with clear text files is.

Yes, Oracle is big, bad and "ebil" and I cannot stand their sales drones.. but if you ever had an "oh CRAP" moment, chances are very good that the db has got your back. Of course it also has its downsides like any other huge software product...

Adsense runs on mysql, how non-critical is that?

I was talking about mongo and couch, not MySQL.

Mongo is by many measures worse than "a folder with clear text files."

I think the bias is huge. In my experience, if you go thru current job listings for developers you'll find a ton of mentions of Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL and, to a lesser extent, DB2 and PostgreSQL (though of course job ads are biased too).

HN does have a strong web developer bias. Afaik I know most major massively multiplayer online games (like World of Warcraft for example) use Oracle. I worked on a game a few years ago that started with MySQL, and switched over to Oracle during development. This is probably only true in larger high budget games though. Social games and f2p games probably use MySQL (or NoSQL) databases because there is a lot more overlap with web development in those worlds.

Eve online uses mssql, however it is no longer their primary bottleneck from what I've read on the dev blogs in the last few years.

It would appear so. The poll question is basically meaningless anyway, as it leaves out "for what purpose." I'm going to have different criteria for storing web app session data than I am storing financial transactions that are subject to audit.

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