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 My Jazz Jukebox: http://www.last.fm/user/leifbk/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
