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Comment by newt0311 | Hacker News Reader

People need an excuse?

Edit: On a more serious note, this is nothing new. MySQL has had bugs and an insane amount of gotchas ever since it was released. Admittedly, every software product has some gotchas but compare the irregularities of MySQL against a comparable product, say PostgreSQL, and MySQL is significantly worse. Combine that with what used to be the developer's disdain for ACID and ANSI SQL standards and there have always been very good reason to never start using MySQL in the first place. Furthermore, MySQL still has inferior support for transactions, views, constrints, etc. compared to other databases and has absolutely atrocious multi-core and multiuser performance.

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Sadly, the LAMP stack has reached canonical status. To alter any portion of it is to depart from the standard and embark on a never-ending uphill hike.

For example, nearly every Drupal module is developed against MySQL and then ported to PostgreSQL as an afterthought. Half of them have nothing but a big //FIXME where the PostgreSQL CREATE TABLE statements are supposed to be. And Drupal has actually made a big, occasionally controversial effort to remain DB-agnostic, to create and use an abstract database API, and to explicitly require every bit of core code to work and be tested under PostgreSQL. I'd guess that a lot of other PHP projects are far more tightly bound to MySQL.

Having said that, this article gives me fond thoughts of ripping MySQL off my servers and running aptitude install postgres.

I could be wrong, but I feel the same could be said for rails (until very recently). It seemed to me that rail's primary target (and maybe ruby at large) is mysql and postgres support was just an afterthought (until the latest 2.2.2 release for rails)

the only places that I don't feel treat mysql as the main premiere db is python and java

in mysql's defense, they have come a long way. they finally added stuff like stored procedures and triggers

In what way do you feel like rails support for postgresql is an afterthought?

I've noticed some books / documentation assume mysql, but that's usually limited to the "and now setup your database" section.

I've been using rails + postgresql for a long time now (almost 2 years in production) and I can't think of a single problem that was due to not using mysql. Of course, I don't use every plugin or feature, so there may be something out there...

the last one I remember are postgres specific bugs involving postgres datatypes.

my memory could be fuzzy but I feel that this would generally occur after a fresh rails release (2.2.2 is the exception)

well I am in the midst of migrating my rails app to postgres now - hopefully what I feel and reality don't match

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