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Comment by lbhdc | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised how low postgres ranks in those trends. I guess I have been in an echo chamber for too long, because my perception was that it was much more pervasive.

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Wordpress and PHP in general are very MySQL heavy I think. That is a lot of volume.

Yet mariadb is what is installed most often for mysql usage requirements.

These days, most smaller users go with a managed DBaaS such as AWS RDS, and on RDS MySQL gets massively more usage than MariaDB.

I build schema management software for MySQL and MariaDB, https://www.skeema.io, used by several hundred companies. Among my userbase, MariaDB is a tiny minority, to such an extent that I wonder if it's worthwhile to continue keeping up with their new quarterly release schedule.

Is it possible MariaDB registers itself as MySQL? No clue how your system works or how you figure out which DB it is.

To clarify, my comment was based on anecdotal discussions and interactions with users, issue reports, feature requests, user enthusiasm for new MySQL support/functionality vs relative lack of enthusiasm for new MariaDB support/functionality, etc.

The Skeema CLI is able to accurately identify your database version and flavor (which is necessary for its functionality), there is no notion of MariaDB registering itself as MySQL. But the CLI does not contain telemetry, so I don't have hard stats on MySQL vs MariaDB usage.

> Simply track your desired schema state in a repo of CREATE statements, and the tool figures out how to apply any changes to your tables and routines.

Wow, this sounds extremely useful, great job! Does anyone know anything like this for Postgres?

Thanks! I know of a couple Postgres tools that work in a declarative fashion: migra [1] and sqldef [2].

Migra is Postgres-specific. Its model is similar to Skeema's, in that the desired-state CREATEs are run in a temporary location and then introspected, to build an in-memory understanding of the desired state which can be diff'ed against the current actual state. (This approach has also been borrowed by other recent tools, including Prisma Migrate [3]). In this manner, the tool doesn't need a SQL parser, instead relying on the real DBMS to guarantee the CREATE is interpreted correctly with your exact DBMS version/flavor/settings.

In contrast, sqldef supports multiple databases, including Postgres and MySQL (among others). Unlike other tools, it uses a SQL parser-based approach to build its in-memory understanding of the desired state. As a DB professional, personally this approach scares me a bit, given the amount of nonstandard stuff in each DBMS's SQL dialect. But I'm inherently biased on this topic. And I will note sqldef's author is a core Ruby committer and JIT author, and is extremely skilled at parsers.

[1] https://databaseci.com/docs/migra

[2] https://github.com/k0kubun/sqldef

[3] https://github.com/prisma/prisma-engines/blob/main/migration...

Nice tool, hadn't heard of it before.

> These days, most smaller users go with a managed DBaaS such as AWS RDS

I think there's likely a long tail of small (non-tech) businesses that run WordPress (or Drupal/Joomla) on a traditional shared web host (the kind that only offers PHP and MySQL/MariaDB).

I'd say that ignoring the whales, PHP and MySQL (especially WordPress) are the opposite of the long tail.

I agree, and even some of the whales are using php/MySQL albeit in some cases, highly modified versions of php.

> These days, most smaller users go with a managed DBaaS such as AWS RDS, and on RDS MySQL gets massively more usage than MariaDB.

Do they, do? I expect all small stuff to be on old school VPSes with included managed DBs.

Has the world of cheap PHP hosting finally moved on? I'd be super surprised.

"Has the world of cheap PHP hosting finally moved on? I'd be super surprised. "

No 90% of wordpress which is 60% of the internet use small local hosted mysql instances. No they don't setup a vm on aws.

WordPress is very widely used, but it is not "60% of the internet" (or even 60% of the web) based on any statistics I see anywhere. Some sites say it's 60% of all CMS's; perhaps you may be transposing these stats?

Anyway, among WP usage, I would confidently wager that the percentage running in "cheap VPS" setups is declining fast each year. Many different reasons for this. The heyday of smalltime independent bloggers (on WP or otherwise) was a decade ago. Large SaaS hosts (including the official wordpress.com) make up a big chunk of WP hosting. Security is a huge issue with self-hosted WP. Companies using WP as a CMS aren't going to use a tiny VPS.

There are still a lot of WordPress instances on cheap VPS setups, don't get me wrong. I just don't believe it's still such a major force where it would make up a majority of new mysql/mariadb installations anymore.

They're probably thinking of stats published by W3Techs.

> WordPress is used by 65.3% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 43.3% of all websites.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

MariaDB is more closely aligned with Wordpress and PHP in terms of licensing. I sort of assumed that most users of (FL)OSS who had previously used MySQL would be using MariaDB by now, but based on comments in this topic I must be wrong.

i use maria and PHP...

I've not seen any company which using a RDBMS, that isn't on PG for the last 5 years, and I'm freelance and bounce around a lot..

Other kinds of DBs it's all over the shop, but yeah, PG seems very dominant here...

> I've not seen any company which using a RDBMS, that isn't on PG for the last 5 years

Facebook: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/07/22/data-infrastructure/my...

I don't think Facebook is hiring a lot of freelance, it's probably not the sort of company the person you're answering to is talking about when they say "here".

I have seen Postgres between 2014 and 2018 at one specific customer, everyone else to where I go it is either Oracle or SQL Server.

It depends pretty much where one bounces around.

Uber: https://eng.uber.com/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

Netezza, Greenplum, Red Shift and CoachroachDB are all Postgres forks. Postgre is pretty popular as well, at least for the recruiters who spam me.

CockroachDB is not a fork of Postgres, it's a NewSQL database written from scratch, compatible with the PostgreSQL protocol, and aiming at being SQL compatible with Postgres.

I think you were thinking about YugabyteDB which is a wrapper/fork around Postgres.

No, I was flat out wrong about CockroachDB. Thanks for correcting me.

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