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Comment by justin_oaks | Hacker News Reader

> It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.

How software "feels" is subjective. Can you be more specific?

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It requires a ton of somewhat arcane maintenance at scale. Vacuum shenanigans, Index fragmentation requiring manual reindexing, Txid wraparounds. I like Postgres but it’s definitely way more work to maintain a large instance than mysql. MySQL just kinda works

Having to tinker with pg_hba.conf files on the server so manage how users can connect.

I'd agree that is annoying yet usually just a one off task, unless you really want different IP allowlists per user.

In complex environments it is not just a one off task. I dealt with it by automating my infrastructure with ansible, but without some tooling it sucks.

The command line experience is old school style i.e. to show tables.

  \c database
  \dt

Versus:

  use database
  show tables

That's psql.

It’s also faster to type.

Not after you have to google, "What's the equivalent of `show tables` in postgres?", because the psql command names are completely arbitrary.

Which you need to do exactly once.

I need to manually admin my database server maybe once every 2 years or so. Definitely not remembering them 2 years later.

Sounds like a YP

They are clearly abbreviations.

\c is for connect.

\dt is for describe tables.

\? shows the help

They kinda make sense if you consider that Postgres was not an SQL database in the beginning. Quirky though.

I assume this is really what it comes down to. If psql added those verbose-but-descriptive commands a whole bunch of people comfortable with mysql would be a lot happier using postgres.

I started with MySQL in 2006 for my personal projects, but what first won me over to psql was those commands.

Today I use CLIs like usql to interact with MySQL and SQLite so I can continue to use those commands.

At first glance they may be less obvious, but they are significantly more discoverable. \? Just shows you all of them. In MySQL it always feels like I need to Google it.

> At first glance they may be less obvious, but they are significantly more discoverable. \? Just shows you all of them. In MySQL it always feels like I need to Google it.

In MySQL either `?` or `help` or `\?` will show you the help...

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