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Comment by garyrob | Hacker News Reader

I remember, waaaaay back in the early days of PostgeSQL, I was using it for project and it crashed in a way that corrupted our data. There was no hardware problem; it was just a database crash. (This was quite some time ago. I don't recall what year it was but I'm 68 now and have been a programmer since my senior year in college.) I switched to MySQL for that project. I assume PostgreSQL is not remotely prone to anything like that anymore!

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It can still happen sometimes, but it's very rare that it crashes and even more rare that it corrupts as well. The good news, the chances of it corrupting your data silently was basically zero, then and now.

However back then MySQL seemed like it went out of it's way to corrupt your data. The only "bonus" is, it did it all silently, so nobody ever noticed until they went looking. With MariaDB(the successor) it's pretty rare that it silently corrupts your data these days.

I believe a lot of that can be tied back to the default switching from myisam to innodb. crashes frequently resulted in corrupt tables with myisam. innodb is very good at recovering.

Could be; but it never happened to me with MySQL! Maybe it depends on on how far back in the day you go...? :)

Around early 00s, it was already common wisdom among the web devs that, when it comes to free RDBMS, if you want speed, you use MySQL; and if you want consistency and reliability, then Postgres is where it's at.

(Most people wanted speed.)

Did you ever go looking for corruption? :) Most people don't.

The database couldn't be used anymore! Pretty severe corruption.

I'm using PostgreSQL since 2002. Never lost anything.

It is rock solid now.

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