Why write a fanboy text with unfair comparisons that hide the Postgres limitations?
For instance, for many simple needs MySQL is simpler than Postgres, with similar performance and consistency.
* No need for a connection pool, while many use cases with Postgres require PgBouncer and Co.
* Easy sort (and basic search) of multilingual text, because MySQL has case insensitive UTF8 collations.
* No need to VACUUM, which can be a hard problem (it was, the last time I used Postgres).
For full text search, I once worked on a project that considered several alternatives for this, including Postgres. Manticore Search was finally chosen because it was more performant, with better search results.
I love postgres and use it heavily, but I still don't fully understand how it overlook MySQL. Maybe because of Heroku adopting it.
MySQL was generally faster, and while MyISAM was a bit limited Innodb was pretty powerful, and you had the choice. It was also simpler (imo) and avoided a lot of the xid/vacuum issues.
That said, still love Postgres. But at the time it started eclipsing MySQL, MySQL felt better positioned.
MySQL was a proven solution back in the day, i.e late 2000s. Github/Twitter/Heroku etc were using it. In the past 10-15 years, Postgres has come a long way.
NVMe drives + Litestream + object storage(S3/R2..). sqlite simplifies things for the entire long tail of apps/services that aren't the Ubers and AirBNBs of the world.
"MySQL was also potentially faster as it did not implement all features of the SQL standard. "
This is a not great start. I assume it refers to MyISAM which has not been relevant for over a decade at this point. InnoDB made different design than PG decisions and was (and perhaps still is) faster at point lookups.
Well, the poster explicitly talks about 2003 here: „ In 2003, MySQL was much more widely used than PostgreSQL. MySQL was also potentially faster as it did not implement all features of the SQL standard“
I use SQLite for everything, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm aware of the concurrent writer issues, but at my scale it doesn't even matter.
if you are searching for something similar but with more meat: https://ebellani.github.io/blog/2026/all-you-need-is-postgre...
Or an entire book covering it: https://www.manning.com/books/just-use-postgres
No mention of https://postgis.net/ - shameful
Why write a fanboy text with unfair comparisons that hide the Postgres limitations?
For instance, for many simple needs MySQL is simpler than Postgres, with similar performance and consistency.
* No need for a connection pool, while many use cases with Postgres require PgBouncer and Co.
* Easy sort (and basic search) of multilingual text, because MySQL has case insensitive UTF8 collations.
* No need to VACUUM, which can be a hard problem (it was, the last time I used Postgres).
For full text search, I once worked on a project that considered several alternatives for this, including Postgres. Manticore Search was finally chosen because it was more performant, with better search results.
I love postgres and use it heavily, but I still don't fully understand how it overlook MySQL. Maybe because of Heroku adopting it.
MySQL was generally faster, and while MyISAM was a bit limited Innodb was pretty powerful, and you had the choice. It was also simpler (imo) and avoided a lot of the xid/vacuum issues.
That said, still love Postgres. But at the time it started eclipsing MySQL, MySQL felt better positioned.
MySQL was a proven solution back in the day, i.e late 2000s. Github/Twitter/Heroku etc were using it. In the past 10-15 years, Postgres has come a long way.
Maria, MySQL, Oracle shenannigans, perhaps.
Also postgres is a "proper" db, so I'm glad it generally won out.
yes. my people.
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_gpt2
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_shell
https://github.com/seanwevans/pg_os
sqlite for everything
NVMe drives + Litestream + object storage(S3/R2..). sqlite simplifies things for the entire long tail of apps/services that aren't the Ubers and AirBNBs of the world.
The older I get the more I agree with this
"MySQL was also potentially faster as it did not implement all features of the SQL standard. "
This is a not great start. I assume it refers to MyISAM which has not been relevant for over a decade at this point. InnoDB made different design than PG decisions and was (and perhaps still is) faster at point lookups.
Well, the poster explicitly talks about 2003 here: „ In 2003, MySQL was much more widely used than PostgreSQL. MySQL was also potentially faster as it did not implement all features of the SQL standard“
At the time, MySQL was also the default for every PHP backed webhost provider. That's the market they lost. They're the Perl of DBs.
there is also https://postgresforeverything.com/