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Comment by pjungwir | Hacker News Reader

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+.

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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.

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.

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.

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