To be clear, I like both. Postgres has a lot more features, and is far more extensible. But there’s no getting around the fact that its MVCC implementation means that at scale, you have to worry about things that simply do not exist for MySQL: vacuuming, txid wraparound, etc.
That was true in 2012; dunno if it still applies though.
Pretty sure that even in 2012 MySQL had very easy to use replication, which Postgres didn't have well into the late 2010s (does it today? It's been a while since I've ran any databases).
Possibly I got it wrong and switched around which was easier on the devs and which was easier on the sysads?
In my defence, ISTR, when talking to sysads about MySQL vs PostgreSQL, they preferred the latter due to having less to worry about once deployed (MySQL would apparently magically lose data sometimes).
But sure, it was easy to get a proof of concept working. But when you tried to break it by turning off network and/or machines, then shit broke down in very broken ways that was not recoverable. I'm guessing most that set up MySQL replication didn't actually verify that it worked well when SHTF.
How did you verify that it was rock solid? And which of the variants did you use?
source: direct personal experience.
sometimes, repairing broken data is easier than, say, upgrading a god damn hot DB.
MVCC is overrated. Not every row in a busy MySQL table is your transactional wallet balance. But to upgrade a DB you have to deal with every field every row every table, and data keeps changing, which is a real headache
Fixing a range of broken data, however, can be done by a junior developer. If you rely on rdbms for a single source of truth you are probably fucked anyway.
btw I do hate DDL changes in MySQL.
Except that search doesn't work, because all text is in latin1 encoding.
What part of searching have you found to not work well using it?
The OPTIMIZE works almost exclusively with online DDL statements. There's only a brief table lock held during table metadata operations, but I haven't found that to be a problem in practice. (https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.4/en/optimize-table.html#...)
To do a cleanup, InnoDB uses the records it kept to delete old data, while Postgres must do a scan. So InnoDB pays a record-keeping price as part of the update that makes it easier to clear data, while Postgres decides to pay this price of occasional scanning.
EDIT: my mistake, OPTIMIZE TABLE is an online DDL. I’ve been burned in the past from foreign key constraint metadata locks essentially turning it into a blocking operation.
* I'm running a lot of MySQL stuff and such a topic might be of interest to me
The fact that you still can't use DDL in transactions makes life exceedingly painful, but it's technically safe if you write your migration code carefully enough.
But to the point, people often use this point to claim that MySQL is a toy database, not usable for real world production use. I use Oracle as a counterpoint, which also has a lot of warts but is pretty much an archetype of an enterprise-grade DB engine.
And then there's UTF8 not actually being UTF8, which can result in total lockup of a table if someone inputs a character that does not fit in UCS-2 and now you need to recover the database from backup and preferably convert all instances of utf8 to utf8mb4, because fuck you that's why.
Postgres is definitely more difficult to administer.