On Friday 14. March 2008, Adrian Klaver wrote:
> Years ago I played around with MySQL because that
> was what "everybody" was using. The problem was it did not do what I
> wanted and Postgres did.
That pretty much sums up my experiences too. Back in 2002 when I started
fooling around with databases, there wasn't much of a competition, and
I used MySQL as 'everybody else' did. But when I reached the point
where issues like data integrity started to matter, I was advised to
try PostgreSQL. I did, and haven't looked back. That was in 2005, and
PostgreSQL was at version 7.4 something.
There are several reasons why MySQL have a lot more users than
PostgreSQL, and in more than one way the parallel to Microsoft vs. *nix
is striking. In the software world, getting a mediocre product on the
market early may often be the key to success, and is commonly referred
to as the "Worse Is Better" principle.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better>
Besides, a lot of database users don't really care for the database
itself. Notably the object/relational mapping (ORM) camp, like Ruby On
Rails, Django, and Catalyst, will consider the DBMS as a dumb storage
engine. With that attitude, combined with the fact that most ORM
frameworks are written mainly for MySQL, it's no wonder that PostgreSQL
doesn't make many inroads here.
--
Leif Biberg Kristensen | Registered Linux User #338009
http://solumslekt.org/ | Cruising with Gentoo/KDE
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