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Comment by sivers | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! And yeah the other inspiration is that in the last 27 years of making web apps, I've gone from PHP to Ruby to JavaScript back to Ruby, considered switching to Go or Elixir, but my PostgreSQL database was at the center of it all, throughout.

So it makes sense to notice what's constant, what's ever-changing, and organize accordingly.

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OOC how did you land on PostgreSQL 27 years ago? That’s before I was doing this sort of thing but 7 years later MySQL definitely seemed like the “no one got fired for choosing..” option.

PS been a big fan of your writing over the years and it’s a little intimidating to just respond to one of your posts asking a silly question haha

Thanks! Robert Kaye - founder of MusicBrainz : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MusicBrainz

He is a friend and much smarter than me. He told me to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL. I'm so glad he did.

As someone that was kicking around back then, PostgreSQL was seen as more of a proper database, but MySQL was both faster and came with batteries included replication. Those really motivated its mass adoption with LAMP style stacks vs PostgreSQL.

Some years down the road however this was changing. PostgreSQL began to catch up in terms of simple performance, but also MySQL stumbled on transitioning into a multicore world, while PostgreSQL scaled better due to some of the hard work already being done in the architecture. Additionally we got an included replication option, as well as all the main PaaS vendors providing automation around it. So MySQL's previous advantages became less compelling.

And today, hardware is so incredibly capable that just scaling vertically on a single server is totally viable for a ton of apps. For this swath of the market, just running PostgreSQL has become a bit of a no brainer in the way that MySQL was during the peak of LAMP.

my vague memories of ~2000 were that postgres was acknowledged as the way to go if you wanted to do it right, but mysql would let you get set up quickly and easily so you could get on with your actual application, and postgres had the reputation of being harder to set up and administer

Same memories here. In the late 90s I chose MySQL over Postgres, at the time for its speed and replication. And at least partly because I got to talk with Monty Widenius at an Open Source Conference (or perhaps even a Perl Conference) in the late 90s about replication, and asked how hard it'd be to make replication use SSL - and he sent me a beta MySQL version with that implemented a few days later. So I had a quite serious "feel good" reason for using MySQL. In the subsequent 5-10 years or so I regretted not choosing Postgres instead over it's stored procedure handling, but we had way to much deeply embedded MySQL tech and skill by then which made switching always end up on the too hard list.

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