Re: Justifying a PG over MySQL approach to a project

Ron Mayer  writes:
> Lincoln Yeoh wrote:
>> Ten or so years ago MySQL was better than Postgres95, and it would have
>> been easy to justify using MySQL over Postgres95 (which was really slow
>> and had a fair number of bugs). But Postgresql is much better than MySQL
>> now. That's just my opinion of course.

> Really?!?

> MySQL development started in '94; and their first internal release was May 95.[1]

> At that time Postgres's SQL language support was new, but didn't the underlying
> database already have a half decade of history that surely was more mature
> than MySQL at the time?

What the underlying database had was a decade or so of development and use
for strictly academic purposes.  This anecdote might help:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2002-06/msg00085.php

It was not until the current community started working on it, circa
1997, that there was any real emphasis on making it stable enough for
production use.  And I would say that we didn't get to the point of
being really production-worthy until 2001 or so, by which time the
"Postgres sucks" meme was already pretty widely established.  And
so was MySQL.  We've been playing catchup in the public-perception
department ever since.

			regards, tom lane