I have very strong feelings that a universally pronounceable product name is ESSENTIAL to wide adoption. PostgreSQL never rolls off the tongue, and it's not fun to say.

> I have very strong feelings that a universally pronounceable product name is ESSENTIAL to wide adoption

What? SQL itself is cursed with people thinking there's one right way to pronounce it, and everybody else is stupid, but PostgreSQL has the advantage that you can just say "Postgres" and dodge that mess. Good luck saying "MySQL" without triggering at least one person in your office.

(I think the official MySQL stance is that both pronunciations are acceptable, but that doesn't stop pedants from being pedantic.)

The only right way to pronounce it is my-squeal

It’s pronounced “postgres”, as in “ingress” but with “in” replaced by “post”. If that helps. No one pronounces the “SQL”, as no one can agree on its pronunciation.

Agreed, though most people just call/pronounce it "post gress". Wish it had a better name though.

i both pronounce and spell it postgres. is that not a formal thing?

It’s how nearly everyone pronounces it, and for the most part spells it in common usage. The formal thing IIRC is that the name is PostgreSQL as it was originally a successor to Ingres, and added SQL support later.

Cultural inertia is a strange issue.

Serious question: If the userbase doesn't think it needs improving, then why are you improving it?

Well, several reasons:

1. Your users leverage unintended behaviours, which obstructs your ability to move forward with meeting needs with intended behaviours in your intended target market (unfortunate but very real)

2. You know if you add or improve existing features, you can access more users, or an prospective user worth more than the existing ones

3. It's a passion project and you want it to function/look/whatever a certain way

I've encountered all of these, and each time it becomes a pretty big pain to make progress.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If your userbase doesn't think it needs improving, people with unfulfilled requirements will go somewhere else. Which may be a good thing if you want to limit the scope and serve a specific market well. But it may also leave you behind with shrinking usage and few new users. (since they prefer to start with the overall better option)

Interesting! What were the features or differences that changed your mind after switching?

I quickly found dealing with time series reports dramatically easier. There's the possibility I was just doing it wrong with MySQL. It seemed so much more expressive for things like writing a query based on an interval and perhaps filling empty cells with default values for example. I also found it very intuitive to connect a UI to our API which would convert various parameters to dynamic queries. That was a game changer; almost all reports could be run by anyone in the company without asking someone to write a query for them. The result was remarkably reliable and easy to maintain. the MySQL version I refactored was much harder to deal with, slower, and only getting worse despite our best efforts.

There were very cool things I couldn't find a way to do in MySQL which eventually made the switch an amazing change. It was trivial to set up aggregated time series tables, and very easy to roll that data up in order to speed up queries with a coarser granularity. At the time I recall window functions making this really clean and easy. It was possible in MySQL (and maybe trivial today, too) but it felt like a massive kludge every step of the way.

This is actually what lead us to consulting someone who could implement the best solutions to these issues that they knew. They encouraged us to adopt Postgres before doing any work, we didn't listen, then as they wrapped up the project they once again advised we leave MySQL behind. He then sent some examples of how we might make the migration and why it would be better. Months later we had made the migration entirely and were very, very glad.

That guy was an AWESOME DBA, and he changed the way I value someone who is good with data and databases. He transformed our team's ability to grow our product, dramatically improved our ability to deliver, and instilled a ton of knowledge in a short time. I can only dream of imparting that to other teams!

Overall I'd say that Postgres provided tools that made working with data easier. I'm not sure if there are any specific features besides a cleaner, simpler,

Weird that that got cut off. I think I intended to say "a cleaner, simpler, more efficient set of tools for working with the type of data I had". And of course, right tool for the right job and all, perhaps there are plenty of cases where MySQL is better. I just haven't found them yet, and probably won't any time soon.