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.
MariaDB.
On the other hand, I've worked with MySQL a few times in the same period, mostly because Oracle, whatever its failings, has kept MySQL alive. Not thriving, but alive. I'm so glad they didn't buy PostgreSQL.
I was there too when Oracle took over and everbody knew what was going to happen.
Happy also that pgsql was not a victim and is still alive!
Back in 2006, the startup I was with moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL because the support we were able to find was both expensive (300 USD/hr) and not satisfactory. Back then MySQL AB (this was before Sun) gave us a 10K two year deal on three servers and they had excellent response times and knowledgeable support.
For PostgreSQL the year 2010 when Salesforce bought Heroku (big plus) and Oracle bought MySQL (big minus for MySQL so indirect big plus to PostgreSQL) was the breakthrough, I would say.
That MySQL didn't get CTE and window functions until 2018 is a sad joke.
That's still the case.
In particular, MySQL is faster for updates (no MVCC), but that comes at a cost that I would be hesitant to pay.
I was explaining that not all of his non-aggregated columns were in his group by, so his query wasn't going to work.... but what do you know, MySQL will just return whatever it feels like from the group in that situation. I expected it not to run at all.
I think there are some flags etc you can use to enable to stricter behavior but it was one of the wildest footguns I've ever seen.
For my use case, JSONB support completely killed most NoSQL solutions.
Saying that, SQL databases are still the king by a wide margin. Postgres has grown more at other SQL DBs expense than anything.
Indeed. I was surprised to find that search volume is about as high as it has ever been: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=nosql&hl...