| ▲ | bri3d 4 days ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> I would highly recommend you read the docs on InnoDB locking then pick Postgres. This made me laugh pretty hard, but it's basically my take too. I'd pretty much go with the same thing. It's interesting to me, though, that people see Postgres as the "big database" and MySQL as the "hobby database." I basically see things as the exact opposite - Postgres is incredibly flexible, very nice to use, and these days, has fewer foot guns at small scale (IMO) than MySQL. It's more academically correct and it generally tends to "work better" at almost any achievable "normal" scale. On the other hand, Postgres is full of pitfalls and becomes very difficult at exceptionally large scale (no, not "your startup got traction" scale). Postgres also doesn't offer nearly the same quality of documentation or recipes for large scale optimization. Almost everything in the 2016 Uber article you link, which is a _great_ read, is still true to some extent with vanilla Postgres, although there are more proprietary scale-out options available now. Postgres simply has not been "hyper-scaled" to the extent that MySQL has and most massive globally sharded/replicated systems started as MySQL at some point. For this same reason, you are likely to be able to hire a MySQL-family DBA with more experience at hyper-scale than a Postgres one. With all that said, I still agree - I'd almost universally start with Postgres, with MySQL as a back-pocket scale-up-and-out option for specific very large use-cases that don't demand complex query execution or transactional workload properties. Unless you have an incredibly specific workload which is a very specific combination of heavy UPDATE and `SELECT * FROM x WHERE id=y`, Postgres will do better at any achievable scale you will find today. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | n_u 4 days ago | parent [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> This made me laugh pretty hard, but it's basically my take too. Haha glad you enjoyed it. > It's interesting to me, though, that people see Postgres as the "big database" and MySQL as the "hobby database." I basically see things as the exact opposite I agree. As I understand Postgres started as a challenger to SQL[1][2] with support for more complicated data types but then in the mid '90s they added SQL support and it was renamed PostgreSQL. Anecdotally I have heard from people working in industry in the 2000s-2010s that Postgres was viewed as less mature so many of the large web applications were on MySQL. This is a bit confusing to me because MySQL was released around the same time Postgres added SQL support but maybe it was because MySQL had a company behind it. Many large scale applications of those days were using MySQL. Facebook developed RocksDB and then MyRocks[3] based on MySQL. Youtube built Vitess [4] which was sharded MySQL which was later used by Slack [5], Square, Pintrest and others. > It's more academically correct I'm curious about this. I know that Postgres implements MVCC in a wasteful way and uses the OS page cache in addition to its buffer pool resulting in double buffering rather than direct I/O. I feel like the more I learn about database internals the more I learn about how MySQL did things the "right" way and Postgres's approach is a bit odd. But perhaps I'm missing something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL#History [2] https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec20... [3] https://engineering.fb.com/2016/08/31/core-infra/myrocks-a-s... [4] https://vitess.io/docs/22.0/overview/history/ [5] https://slack.engineering/scaling-datastores-at-slack-with-v... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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