When did Postgres become cool?

If you were paying attention, postgres always the better option, based on my experience starting around 2002 or so. MySQL had the better marketing in its name and was arguably a bit easier to get going from the start, but postgres was always more advanced and IMHO once you got past the most basic usage made a lot more sense in how it's configured.

The fact that it was the M in the LAMP stack gave it a huge edge too. What was at one point an all day, if not multiday setup and configuration process became a simple install script once LAMP became a thing.

MySql was the "default" for a long time until Oracle muddied the waters just enough to make devs look around a bit.

I run Postgres since about 2016. I used to run MySQL behind the same frontend app.

I barely know anything about Postgres beyond installation for our use case, backup and recover. I used to know loads about obscure MySQL optimization techniques, fixing broken tables, fiddling with scary parameters and recovering from hair raising situations.

I like my current state of ignorance.

When MySQL was purchased by Oracle.

For a time, MariaDB was the new option, but its commitment to binary compatibility with MySQL made it feel bogged down.

Fun fact: Julian Assange contributed code to PostgreSQL a long time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18464671

The only correct answer to this question is 2012-09-10, the PostgreSQL 9.2 release date. In that release they unveiled JSON datatypes, and developers were able to have their cake and eat it too.

https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/postgresql-92-released...

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...

When shopping for an open source SQL database, cool is not the first thing in your mind. You are looking for familiarity, compatibility, reliability, viability etc etc, lots of -ity words that are decidedly uncool but, ahem, realy important.

What made postgres "cool" for me was the realisation that you get more than what you bargain for:

> More than "just a database", it's a data platform

This feeling of being also relevant for the evolving world of data engineerimg comes from noSQL functionality like JSON support and also extensions that allow graph operations.

So postgres is cool because it is a reliable workhorse that wont let you down but its codebase and community have also the DNA of a racehorse that can win an occasional race for you.

What else can you ask of a horse? :-)

I remember going to a general community-run tech conference in Vienna in 2002 and there was a talk on PostgreSQL which I'd never heard of at that point (had been using MySQL and Oracle). The person giving the talk was a nerd and quite enthusiastic, and quite sad that PostgreSQL wasn't more popular. Come to think of it, I guess that person is happy now :)

So I would say it was already "cool" at that point (albeit not in wide use, at least in my circles).

We weren't too happy with Oracle (pricing), and we'd only moved to that after being unhappy with MySQL in 2000 (no transactions!). I think PostgreSQL would have been a good choice for us, and I did give it a try, but migrating all the data out of Oracle just didn't really seem possible (Oracle didn't provide great export tools as you can imagine, and a "SELECT col1 || "," || col2 .." type of thing to produce a CSV would have taken hours per table and we had a few dozen tables, so would have either resulted in days of downtime, or some funky logic with a lookup table to say which database a user was in and moving them over one-by-one, but then what about FKs? what about a "messages" table where one user sends a message to another? etc. So on Oracle we stayed until the end of the product around 2012.

I'll argue that it was Heroku that made Postgres popular. It was easy and simple to get set up, and it pretty much just worked. It was the first time I'd used it, and the first place many of my friends and coworkers had used it. Heroku was "mediatemple for apps built in the 2010s" and Postgres being the default (and really only sql option outside the marketplace) was a huge win for Postgres.

Edit: I also think emoji becoming popular was a huge win for Postgres. Emoji didn't work in MySQL because "utf8" wasn't actually UTF-8 and "utf8mb4" made indexes super limited for dumb reasons. As people started realizing this, it hurt MySQL's reputation pretty badly and a lot of folks avoided it for new projects.

I've been running postgres since, I think, 2008. Mainly I don't like MSFT in general (although I admit VS Code and WSL are pretty cool). I tried MySQL on my first blog and a couple projects and it just seemed too be a bit to chaotic (how many engines do you need?), then a bit too gross (post acquisition). Some of the guys I work with use MariaDB, but at this point I've met Michael Stonebraker and some hardcore postgres folks and it just feels like the right way. Plus it seems like the cloud vendors tend to support Postgres-like features (e.g. Redshift) so that seems like a hella safe bet.

> Postgres wasn't always the cool kid.

Has been since before the Maria/MySQL split in my sphere of the world. Always interesting to see how different people perceive tools over time.

Honestly this sounds more like "When did psql go mainstream"?

When I started using Django 10 years ago during the Django/Rails era, Postgres was by far the most recommended DB to use. Not sure if that was also true in Rails community.

I don't know when, but I just came back to it after a stint of first MySQL and then MS SQL, and the first feeling I got is that here is a piece of software that seems to be made by people who just want to make my day better.

Just my 2 cents and I generally agree with the sentiment in the comments about Postgres just being rock solid reliable and having great integrations / vendor neutral.

One of the huge benefits I see with Postgres is its extension system. PostGIS is amazing. Can save any company that needs to do heavy geospatial processing $$$ by dodging ESRI. The only database I've found that handles geospatial stuff better is BigQuery, but considering the revolution that was Google Maps over the best decade I don't think that would really surprise anyone.

I remember bringing a postgresql book to a sleepover when I was in high school around 2002. An IRC friend was on the pgsql advocacy mailing list and we were all obsessed.

Now were we cool? I have my doubts. We sure thought pgsql was cool though (still do!)

As with anything truly cool, it was cool long before most people noticed. I have been using Postgres on and off since ~7.2 and it has always been amazing. Being known as cool takes time.

I know I made the decision in 2012 or so. The startup I was working at used Postgres for the server, and I didn't know anything about databases, so, okay, fine, whatever. Then they started an analytics team, which went with MySQL ... and ended up discovering that MySQL only handled up to 3-byte characters of UTF-8, which was a problem since the users of our game Chinese characters and lots of creative abuses of Unicode characters. My takeaway was that UTF-8 has always been at least 4 bytes (and I think it might have required 6 back then, which has since been walked back), and that any database which could not implement the spec of something fundamental like UTF-8 correctly was completely out of the realm of consideration.

Josh Berkus had a great talk on the history of Postgres forks and variants. Link below to slides from a version of this talk in 2009:

https://www.slideshare.net/pgconf/elephant-roads-a-tour-of-p...

I think it's this: a group of well-intentioned, collaborative experts spent 30 years on a project.

It doesn't need an expensive website or loads of devrel or non-grassroots event management - those are what you do to simulate success until maybe you make it. It needs smart people over a long period of time.

Postgres for a long time was the leader in doing geospatial calculations thanks to postgis. It became popular with the rise of apps like uber and doordash because it had better support for geospatial calculations required to make decisions on how to allocate drivers to users around town and deal with surges.

I remember in the early-mid aughts I evaluated Postgres vs MySQL. At the time the conventional wisdom seemed to be that Postgres was focusing more on robustness and MySQL more on functionality. And a lot of people seemed to prefer MySQL because of this.

When I looped back around several years later Postgres had started to overcome MySQL. Conventional wisdom then was it was roughly at feature parity with MySQL but more robust.

So it would seem that working on having a robust inner core first paid off, even if it cost some early reputation.

When Oracle bought MySQL, developers really started looking hard at Postgres.

MySQL developers peeking over the fence at Postgres realized their database lagged way behind Postgres when it came to transactional DDL statements, window functions, basically most modern SQL stuff. MySQL was just sloppy from a developer's perspective... weird nonstandard SQL RDBMS behavior in places.

I've heard that MySQL has made nice strides in recent years. Cool, I guess. Not really trying to tie my future to Oracle.

An interesting reason I became intrigued with Postgres in the early 2000s was the license it was/is distributed under. The situation involved some work for a customer that needed to distribute an RDBMS along with their software. The customer had more apprehension around the GPLv2-licensed MySQL than the BSD-esque PostgreSQL License [0], so we went with Postgres.

I later continued using Postgres in my career after having done quite a variety of benchmarks and came to the conclusion that it, in general, scaled more linearly across additional CPUs than MySQL's InnoDB engine did at the time.

[0] PostgreSQL License: https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

When I started working with Rails in 2008 having come from PHP, both communities were pretty squarely in the MySQL camp by default. That changed quickly over the following couple of years however. As I recall, the free Heroku Postgres offering had a huge influence.

Nobody seems to have mentioned the MySQL licensing kerfuffle that got it pulled from most main stream Linux distros. For some of us this was the nail in MySQL coffin at a time when Postgres was becomming easier to manage.

My first experience with postgres was around 2009. Picked it out of curiosity and it ended up at the clients server doing it’s job and never bothered anyone.

I thought it was very cool doing fancy joins and reliable procedures but then came the NoSQL era and I nearly forgot about it. Then everyone started to realize that any growing database ends up with complicated relations and lots of applications do not fit non-relational data structures well. Suddenly postgres came up with the json and jsonb types. It was like a fairytale.

So when did it became cool? Around 2016/2017. Why? Good technical decisions and execution.

What IS "cool"?

It's that moment just before something becomes uncool, lol.

Software developers are glorified teenagers. Once something goes from upstart to widely used, developers get bored with it or else frustrated with the issues that arise from actual professional use. Then they go looking for the next fashionable upstart.

Oddly, I feel like PostgreSQL is on it's second cycle through this loop now.

Hmm for me when Oracle bought MySQL.

Interesting thread/post on Heroku's choice to go with Postgres, and speculation that that decision was pivotal in Postgres's rise its status as the relational database of choice for hackers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31425115

I picked PostgreSQL over MySQL for a project I did in 2005. I picked it since the project would benefit from many advantages which PostgreSQL already had over MySQL, and it would not particularly benefit from MySQL’s only often-touted advantage, speed. This turned out to be the correct choice, and this has not changed since.

Was it that Postgres became cool or that MySQL became unreliable post-Oracle and developers were looking for an alternative?

Right around the time that Oracle went on a buying spree.

I think Heroku played less than a role than it sounds like. Sure, they offered it for Rails, but working with Rails especially back then a typical Rails application made very little use of any of the features.

It typically was and to a degree still is tables rather than arrays, application defined integers instead of Postgres Enums, in general very little user defined types, Rail's validation system instead of Postgres constraints (even automatic querying for duplicates).

Sure it might have made people hear about Postgres, but I think few people using ORMs really could tell you anything about any of all the amazing features that Postgres has. I think Arrays might be the main one.

i used mysql for almost 20 years, since 3.23 and in the last 4 years i am exclusively using postgres (because of the hype and i thought i am missing out), and its not my cup of tea.

i just love mysql's hackable storage engine (particularly the new lsmt engines), and i hate toast so much, not to mention the permission system which is so convoluted and it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot. and of course it does not play nice with low iops ebs.

its too expensive to migrate from pg now, but i would avoid it in the future

i usually dont use super sophisticated sql, so mysql is actually pretty good for me considering i can tune the knobs on some tables pretty well.

I would rather say 7.0. With 9.0 it was already established as superior.

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.0/release.htm vs https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/release-9-0.html which added full windows support.

I wish engineers would stop treating technology like fashion. PostgreSQL has been solid for decades. Don't care whether anyone thinks it is "cool".

Postgres has always been cool.

I remember back in the day when Ingress was the cool kid (running on HP-UX at our shop I think). Almost overnight there was a fork in the road and everyone went to either Orcale or SQL Server. Now I would touch anything other then Postgres. The more I use and learn about it the more I appreciate all the work that has gone into it over the years.

The point is, it never became cool.

It was a good tool, and it still is. There is no marketing, no fluff, no buzz world.

It gets the job done.

That's what's good about it.

About at the transition between oracle 11 and 12, wmvare was quickly becoming the next big thing, and oracle licensing was causing concerns I don't precisely recall with virtual deployments. In conjunction with orm reaching good maturity and postgres starting to catch up with benchmark it was the perfect storm.

One thing that made me slightly iffy in one of the usecases Postgres would be a no brainer is the need to vacuum for dead tuples. I was quite sketched by it and instead opted for traditional NoSQL stack. I wonder how people with large volumes of UPSERTs deal with vacuuming, isn’t it a huge operational burden?

> the first Postgres company Great Bridge.

That doesn't seem correct. Wasn't PostgreSQL Inc. the first PostgreSQL company?

For me after trying all the "cool" stuff like mongo etc, seeing the great support Posgres has for JSON just made it an easy choice.

Use all the relational stuff but still have nice native support for JSON and useful extensions.

What else do I need?

Even now, with the addition of vector stores we get PGVector and so it just reinforces my choice over time.

I first started noticing that apparently lots of people had begun to find it cool some five or eight years ago... So, given how incredibly hip and well-connected and "with it" I am, presumably at least some five (or perhaps ten) years before that.

So ca 2010, maybe just a little earlier?

Postgres was cool. Now SQLite is cool. In a few years .INI files will be cool. Fads gonna fad.

With me, it was around 5 years ago although first inkling started w/JSON support 8 yrs ago.

~5 years ago in the midwest.

in 02002–02004 i worked at a startup shipping an on-premises saas network management system (i.e., buy our appliance and install it) built on postgres, after a previous startup using mysql. even then postgres was a perfectly fine database; at the time there wasn't much reason to prefer postgres or mysql over each other unless you were running at massive scale, where even oracle couldn't hold a candle to mysql's readslaves

99% of the time i'm using a sql database it's because i don't care about cool features tho. i mean window functions and json and recursive ctes are definitely cool but my orm isn't gonna use them

the startup got bought out a couple years later, so i guess it was successful, but my options were so diluted they weren't worth much

the huge difference in my experience was going from no credible gratis sql rdbms in 01993 or so, to msql in 01994 (gratis but far from libre), to mysql in 01996 (gratis but not quite libre) and postgresql (libre!) in the fuzzy period 01996–02000. postgres didn't support sql until 01996 but for reasons i don't remember wasn't really a viable alternative to mysql until about 01999. i don't remember exactly when mysql started offering a real free-software license but i think it was maybe 02000 or 02001; the lawsuit over nusphere's infringement of mysql's gpl was 02002

maybe gumby can weigh in with his experience trying to sell people on an enhanced postgres fork supporting cross-data-center oltp at zembu (eventual-consistency-like multisite performance but without the eventual consistency, which is to say, inconsistency). other founders were ncm and ian (lance) taylor: http://web.archive.org/web/20010617143323/http://www.zembu.c...

nowadays i think sqlite is kind of the big competitor; lower write performance, higher read performance (except for very complex queries where its simple execution model is inadequate), and much lower hassle

probably all these non-column-store designs are obsolete; i'm curious whether there's a column-based sql database that offers the same degree of hassle-freeness as sqlite or even postgres

Integrated fulltext search engine!

Upgrading is still too much of a pain though

People like lightweight and simple databases. Maybe it became cool because a lack of development, making all other databases bloated in comparison?

For me it became cool when I realised I could also use it as a vector database with the awesome pgvector extension

Postgres became over-the-top cool for me the moment I started to realize what pg-cli could do.

2003-2005, it started to show stability and solve replication issues that held it back.

I always thought it was cool. We used it in uni when the whole world was going nuts over mysql

I jumped ship from MySQL/MariaDB around psql 9.6 and haven't looked back.

Postgres became cool when the scales fell off peoples eyes and they realized that very few use cases necessitate or even benefit from "NoSQL" databases.

I have been using Postgres since version 6.x and I thought it was cool back then.

1998 if i recall correctly...

For me about 2001 or 2002, I think. It never became uncool since.

> Postgres wasn't always the cool kid. It didn't emerge from millions of dollars of VC funding

Hahaha, a thing that is cool and emerges from millions of dollars of VC funding. Hahahaha

I see a lot of comment reflecting on MySQL and oracle vs postgresql.

Anyone with experience of MSSQL and PostgreSQL who'd like to comment on how it they compare?

I started using PostgreSQL because its clustering and replication was so much better than MySQL at the time.

Postgres has been cool since the early 2000s. SQLite is even cooler.

:planet: :gun:

Since the second someone found a reasonable enterprise alternative to the proctology practice that is Oracle.