On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 11:10, Vincent Veyron <vv.lists@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> However, I once read that the real reason is that mysql was available
> when ISPs came of existence, circa 1995. It lacked important features of
> an RDBMS (you can google the details), but it was enough to satisfy the
> needs of php scripts for instance.
>
> First to market, in short.
Let's not forget that PostgreSQL sucked, too, back then.
PostgreSQL's maintenance was absolutely horriffic. And if you got it
wrong, it would bog down all your hardware resources. MySQL lacked
many features, but it "just worked" without maintenance.
E.g. VACUUM/ANALYZE needed to be ran manually and it used to take an
*exclusive* lock on tables, for longish periods, preventing any
queries! Failure to vacuum would cause the files to bloat without
limit and slow down your queries gradually. In the worst case, you hit
XID wraparound and the database would shut down entirely.
Even still in 8.3 (which was newest until 2009) with autovacuum, if
you got max_fsm_pages tuned wrong, vacuum would basically stop
functioning and your tables would bloat.
Regards,
Marti