The title is disappointingly misleading — the actual features of command-line clients, i.e. auto-completion, variables, output-formatting are left out in favor of comparing SQL dialects for the most basic operations.
misleading, not a real comparison. and offtopic i'd really like to have a nice mysql curses commandline client
I switched job one year ago and thus switched from Posgres to MySQL and I still can't understand why PostgreSQL isn't a clear winner for hackers. MySQL's SQL is almost always wrong (implicit defaults, implicit grouping), the CLI is much worse, the introspection is not comparable, etc.
Every time I see someone using MySQL I ask them why they didn't choose PostgreSQL. Often, the answer is that they haven't heard about it.
It's ridiculous; every time I have been forced to use a MySQL system it comes across as such a stone-age tool, outdated and badly designed in almost every respect. Sure, you can debate various technical merits (MySQL has at least two), but the main reason for MySQL's continued popularity is not technical, but historical.
Yes but the fact that Google and Facebook seem to endorse it is not helping.
Most of the mysql holdouts I've encountered have a deeply ingrained notion that postgresql is hard (no idea where this idea comes from though) and because it tries to be reasonably correct, it must be "some academic nonsense" with no practical value for "just getting stuff done". Usually if you can force them to use postgres for a couple weeks they get over it and realize how bad mysql really is.
Because PostgreSQL was 'hard', compared to when MySQL was younger. It just had a cli tool, it was to be managed in a more 'professional' way whereas MySQL made itself much easier to be installed and managed by even entry level and junior programmers who didn't want to know how to manage a database earlier on in its history.
One thing that drives me nuts about the mysql CLI is that if you type 'mysql --help' it spits out the help flags followed by three or four screenfuls of variable settings.