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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

how/why did you choose Postgres over MariaDB? I am facing such a decision now.

After working for years with both, I'd say that PostgreSQL is much more friendlier to the developer and more pleasant to work with. In any area: documentation, features, error messages, available SQL features, available extensions, available docs, available books.

One tiny example: I prefer to work with databases using CLI interfaces (mysql and psql).

psql CLI is a tool which is pleasant to use, has no bugs in the interface and it even gets improvements from time to time.

mysql CLI is awful to use (e.g. doesn't display long lines properly, has difficulties with history editing, etc) and looks like there wasn't a single improvement since 1996 (I'm sure there were, I just never felt the effect of such improvements).

I’ve been using a Postgres foreign data wrapper to interact with a MySQL database and it’s much nicer for interactive use.

Yep Postgres seems to have more features too for sure. Also, a fun little limitation of the MySQL CLI is that it truncates hostnames to 100 characters - not usually a problem, but AWS database VPC hostnames easily hit that limit, and it just silently truncates rather than failing.

"It silently does something unexpected rather than failing" succinctly summarizes all the reasons you shouldn't be using MySQL.

Actually, there was a significant regression. Many many years ago, Oracle decided to drop the support for the gpl-licensed readline altogether, likely because they can't ship it with MySQL Enterprise. To this day, Percona still carries a small patch to add that functionality back, which is great because I wouldn't touch any CLI without readline.

Dropping a link to `rlwrap` in case anyone is not familiar with it:

https://github.com/hanslub42/rlwrap

Note that I've never tried it myself with the mysql/mariadb CLI, but I have used it with other tools, and it's brilliant.

Not MariaDB but after working with Postgres for six years I'm now using MySQL and... the error messages are useless, and comparing different types works in strange ways rather than failing like in Postgres.

To add, execution plans presented by MariaDB are also nearly useless.

User grants in Maria/MySQL drive me nuts. I hope it is better in Postgres

Postgres always

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