Why PostgreSQL is better than MySQL

I&#x27;m a huge Postgres fan and yes I&#x27;m probably biased towards it. I do think it&#x27;s probably the best open source database out there, but I also don&#x27;t love these types of posts.<p>What makes something better than another things is a whole host of things, not just highlighting one really bad case from the other side. I&#x27;m sure if the MySQL world wanted they could point out ways that MySQL is so much better than Postgres. Just look back at how long it too for us to get upsert, we&#x27;re finally getting a better replication story in recent years. To take this one case and highlight it doesn&#x27;t put the Postgres community in a positive light and it&#x27;s a shame, because most I know within the community value good engineering work.<p>MySQL has had a lot of people that contribute to it and has some good things about it, it might be worthwhile for us to pay more attention to where they are better and just focus on improving Postgres and leaving things at that.

MySQL is bad because they&#x27;ve tracked a bug across 3 different companies &amp; working groups.<p>Postgres is good because we have no open bug tracker whatsoever and we&#x27;re always adding new features!<p>I can&#x27;t figure out who this article is for - certainly not DBAs!

The reality, for once, met my expectations in this article. Making imperative assumptions and backing them up with a poorly written 450 word count article that some angry (literally: &quot;OMG sorry LMAO there is a 14,5 year old bug that was solved just now so the product must definitely be worse than the other one&quot;) developer wrote down in two minutes. That&#x27;s what the title implied instantaneously.<p>Sometimes I don&#x27;t understand the HN community. There is so much good stuff on this page, but at other times things that certainly don&#x27;t deserve any attention make it to front page.

I was hoping to see analysis of few features and their performance under various constraints.<p>In the end, felt like click-baited

Perhaps a better title would have been: &quot;One way in which PostgreSQL is better than MySQL&quot;. While I love Postgres, I have to admit that MySQL has its usefulness as well. I just did a side project where I started in node and postgres, realized I needed to hand it over to a guy who would want to end up hosting it on some 5 dollar a month PHP-esque plan. So, I bit the bullet, migrated the DB over to MySQL, and rewrote the backend in Laravel&#x2F;PHP. It&#x27;ll do just fine for his usage. My alternative was to host it on DigitalOcean, and then become the IT guy.... or perhaps spin up Heroku... but in the end, I just wanted to pass off a package and be done with it. MySQL was dead simple for my use.

This post actually makes me wonder... is there anyone that objectively still thinks MySQL is the better database of the two?<p>The only small advantage of MySQL I can think of (which is a great downside as well) is that it&#x27;s really tolerant towards all sorts of erroneous usage and data.<p>The following should be a problem but are accepted by MySQL<p>- missing group by clauses<p>- all of the `ignore` commands (insert, alter table, etc.) - incorrect dates<p>- not enforcing foreign key constraints

Curious: has anyone tried linking a Postgres installation with a MySQL installation using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EnterpriseDB&#x2F;mysql_fdw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;EnterpriseDB&#x2F;mysql_fdw</a> ?<p>My intuition is that, if there&#x27;s anything MySQL does uniquely well on the &quot;being an ACID datastore&quot; front, then this would let you get the best of both worlds—essentially letting some of your Postgres tables use MySQL&#x27;s storage engines <i>et al</i>.

I had hoped that this article will illustrate the scientific&#x2F;technical reasons for PostgreSQL&#x27;s superiority over MySQL. Alas, it just mentions that there was a bug that got fixed after 14+ years in MySQL. The author doesn&#x27;t even mentions the severity of the bug and the negative effects it had. Overall, for me this article is nothing but the author just &quot;blowing his&#x2F;her own horn&quot;.

What annoys me about MySQL is that it gets simple basic SQL wrong. For example<p><pre><code> update foo set a = b, b = a </code></pre> is supposed to swap the values in columns a and b, according to the SQL standard. Logically, all of the right hand sides are evaluated using the pre-update values from the columns, and then the results are assigned.<p>In MySQL, it logically does the assignments left to right, not evaluating an assignment&#x27;s right hand sides until it gets to that assignment, and that evaluation uses the updated values from the already evaluated assignments.<p>In Python terms, it is supposed to be like this:<p><pre><code> a, b = b, a </code></pre> but it is instead like this:<p><pre><code> a = b b = a </code></pre> If we had the time, I&#x27;d love to switch to something else just to get rid of annoyances like that.

My only take away from this article was PostgreSQL doesn&#x27;t use a bug tracker. I didn&#x27;t even know there are large projects out there not using some tracking system for bugs&#x2F;issues

&gt; If you use PostgreSQL in the cloud or from a services company, make sure you ask them what they have contributed to PostgreSQL and what their capability is to fix bugs and with what SLA. The answer to that question is what keeps open source well funded for these latest developments and future ones too.<p>Reasonable sounding theory. How true is it, how significant?<p>Does that story describe how 2ndquadrant gets business -- other vendors have customers asking for an SLA on PostgreSQL fixes, which would require PostgreSQL experts to meet?

I&#x27;m curious about the strategic thinking behind a post like this. I&#x27;d think that the serious money that can be gained by taking marketshare from another database for a company like 2ndquadrant would be in businesses using (or contemplating) Oracle Database, not Oracle (or some version of) MySQL.

Is it just me, or was that huge bug with serious implications if you don’t know it exists? I don’t often use MySQL, maybe its well know in the community.

if you&#x27;re not keeping score you&#x27;re only practicing<p>So the main point why postgres is better is that they don&#x27;t use a bug-tracking system? Definitely that makes any qualified comparison impossible of such claims as the better &quot;time to fix&quot; or bug responsiveness. IMHO this post is trying to sell a weakness as a strength.

What about Postgres DBAs? I don&#x27;t see too many of those around to allow Postgres to be picked up more....

Isn&#x27;t MariaDB where it&#x27;s at, nowadays? And MySQL is tainted by Oracle?

This type of shitpost makes the &quot;victim&quot; look better every time.

Not being owned by Oracle?

Does anyone have a link to a collective list of all known bugs in PostgreSQL?

It is refreshing to see someone just come out and say this.

2017 and my dude still trying to sell consulting by applying the old emacs vs vim strategy. I usually defer to facebook using thousands of mysql and other big companies using way more instances of pgsql for day to day advice. Maybe next time, with a better blog or a matrix with some effective info noting the experience you guys have managing&#x2F;developing against it. Also the patch for MySQL would be appreciated, why it did took you so long ? xoxox