Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I do prefer PostgreSQL if I have a choice, but from the practicality standpoint that many people are hitting on, I'm okay with various design decisions (i.e. take a look at some of the flags for MySQL's `sql-mode` option over the years) being phased out via the normal (warn -> deprecate -> throw error -> remove) lifecycle that things like this often go through in software. Once a technology gets wide adoption, no matter how "flawed" or not earlier versions were, you start to prioritize stability and reliability over "correctness" at some point. This leads to the understandably practical approach to many bugs in many enterprise systems where the team supporting a tech stack learns to work around the rough edges, and might even depend on certain "weird" functionality because it's simply more practical in both the short and long term than not doing it.

None of the above means that I don't see MySQL as flawed in some ways. I'm in a group of developers that I suspect make up a sizable portion of the MySQL community who didn't choose MySQL, but must support it, if for no other reason than because we see ourselves as professionals, and that's what professional do: make the employer's application work reliably.

For applications that have already survived past the point of finding product/market fit, a wholesale conversion of DBMS is rarely worth it, and conversions of this type are costly/risky even if it is worth it. I do understand many of the benefits (real and theoretical) of PostgreSQL, and if I'm around at the moment when a project's DBMS is being selected I'm going to recommend _not_ MySQL, but at some level I'm also paid to make the application that my employer is running on top of their DBMS work reliably ... and the fact is even among people who get PostgreSQL - who prefer it, would choose it if they could - many of us are also pragmatic enough not to pull the rug out from under a running application for "reasons".




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: