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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

1. It's far more popular so easier to find solutions to problems.

2. Used by very popular websites e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo so you get projects like http://webscalesql.org to utilise.

3. More options for client side tooling although debatable whether these are better than generic options.

4. MySQL Cluster is a more cohesive solution for clustering.

5. The most likely reason: you have bought something that needs it.

Obviously PostgreSQL has plenty of reasons for choosing it over MySQL.

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For me the biggest reason not to change to PostgreSQL was the sad state of pgAdmin. In my opinion it doesn't hold a candle against the MySQL Workbench or the old MySQL tools.

Sure there are commercial options available, but it is really nice to have some good free or open source tools for a database.

Other than that PostgreSQL looks like a nice database, but I didn't find the "killer" argument to change to it. All the nice SQL syntax changes don't mean too much to me, because I am mostly using an ORM to access the database.

Another thing which isn't working as well on PostgreSQL is master - master clustering. All the solutions I found for PostgreSQL looked inferior to Galera (which has its own pitfalls). On the other hand I think it is far better to have one / two beefy servers than having a cluster of master databases.

pgAdmin is a disaster, and honestly all the tooling around PostgreSQL is not in the best shape. I am currently working on a new cross-platform database admin for PostgreSQL and MySQL - Datazenit[0]. It tries to solve a lot of problems other DB tools have and provides a nice UI on top of it. If you are interested, check it out.

[0] - https://datazenit.com

Looks neat, why not open it up for the community? Your site design just begs for a "Fork Me on GitHub" link.

Looks pretty nice. I am not too fond of web-based database management tools, but it looks good.

One thing I'd like to see in this software would be export to Excel directly (not CSV). I am no big fan of CSV (e.g. Excel can't handle UTF-8 text in CSV files) and think that exporting to xlsx is a tremendous time saver. Exporting to SQL dumps is another important feature - but I see that you have this in your tool.

> For me the biggest reason not to change to PostgreSQL was the sad state of pgAdmin. In my opinion it doesn't hold a candle against the MySQL Workbench or the old MySQL tools.

Oh I agree, but for many projects its not really an issue.

With Django, you can use the Django admin for GUI changes and the REPL shell for more programatic changes.

On my Django projects, I've never had to actually write SQL.

You never had to copy data from a test database to the productive database or the other way around ?

I am using MySQL Workbench all the time for tasks like this.

The odd point i would add is that Amazon are betting on it with Aurora. While Aurora is not really MySQL, the fact that they decided upon the MySQL API rather than PostgreSQL really says a lot about the market penetration of MySQL and that its truly got some life left in it yet.

Personally, I love PostgreSQL, it's my preference in terms of a db engine...but i have to agree with a lot of the above comments (excluding pt 4 about cluster - thats a world of trouble in my experience)

http://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

From my understanding, Aurora is a modified MySQL with a few components substantially rewritten and a new, log-structured storage engine added that is well integrated with Amazon's storage infrastructure (volumes auto-grow, quorum is handled at the storage layer, replicas are just caching views on top of shared, replicated storage). MySQL has support for multiple storage engines over a relatively simple API, while Postgres is tightly integrated with its storage engine.

In addition, MySQL just has a lot fewer features and points of extensibility, so it would likely be easier to support.

I see a few down-votes (thats cool...) out of curiosity and to better the discussion would anyone down-voting mind adding to the conversation? Generally curious about peoples thoughts on the MySQL V PostgreSQL situation, in particular how the community is receiving Aurora.

6. A lot more people available on the market with mysql familiarity

7. Wider support by libraries in virtually any language

8. Nearly guaranteed availability in any web facing environment (think about WordPress - if it required Postgres, would it be as popular?)

This isn't to argue superiority in any sort of meaningful technical way - sometimes your data store decision isn't all about the technical bits, unfortunately.

> This isn't to argue superiority in any sort of meaningful technical way - sometimes your data store decision isn't all about the technical bits, unfortunately.

Quite often, actually. I have more than few customers demanding Oracle, because you can't have serious business without Oracle, right?

Then they found out the price and started demanding Oracle XE for production use. Sigh.

My biggest complaint about MySQL, there is no equivalent of pgpool or pgbouncer. There was the dreadful mysql proxy, but it's basically dead. All of the other solutions are commercial, terrible, or both.

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