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Comment by elteto | Hacker News Reader

I am really glad to see all the adoption and recognition that Postgres is receiving nowadays, there was a time when all you could hear about was MySQL (or maybe this is just my perception). It seems to me that it has picked up even more after the Oracle takeover of MySQL, but it could also be that their feature set has reached a pretty mature point, or maybe a combination of both.

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Having seen the internals of Postgres, it's a better product. It's pretty simple: it comes from a better core, with more sound theoretical underpinnings, from smarter people. It deserves the recognition and growth, and it's incredible to me that it continues to keep its high level of quality.

I like Postgres much more than MySQL, but my theory is that it's taken off because so many developers have been forced to try it out in order to use Heroku.

But you're right, a ton of great stuff has been added in 8.4+.

Anecdotally speaking, yes that was exactly why I first tried it out (when Heroku first launched a few years back.)

Glad I did though.

I think it's taken off since Oracle bought MySQL, Inc.

Yep, there's probably a pretty big bit of truth to that. Postgres was on the up before (at least in the Python community where most frameworks had decided to run with it following Django's pretty significant endorsements of Django over MySQL), but after seeing MySQL bought I guess people didn't have much confidence in either Oracle or Monty's new venture and decided to take a good look at the other "big guy" of the Open Source world.

Which coincidentally followed the (probably much-needed) performance improvements which started landing heavily in the 8.x series.

Postgres has also been heavily endorsed by Django since the early days and used heavily in the Python community. Instagram is a Django site, so the fact that they use Postgres is not too surprising.

Nah, it's been steadily growing through various discovery paths over the last 2-3 years.

Personally I caught on once I saw the feature list of 9.0. And 9.1... then 9.2... they just keep adding cool stuff that's made well. It becomes difficult to ignore.

I suspect I wasn't alone in seeking a freely available and "real" database a few years ago and initially going with MySQL because I followed the herd. Then, while using MySQL for some significant projects, I learned that it had some quite serious limitations in even relatively basic functionality like transactions. That prompted my personal interest in Postgres, and I saw a project with all of the same advantages that had made MySQL attractive, but also a technically better product. I've never used MySQL since.

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