In the last 15 years every news (on /. and HN) that mentions MySQL is interrupted with such questions from Postgres fanboys. How about: MySQL is the very best solution for such tasks and Postgres isn't the universal holy grail? Wouldn't it be better to try to convert people over from (Postgres direct competitors) MSSQL, OracleDB, DB2 to Postgres?
Frankly, no; I've used all of Postgres, MySQL, MSSQL, and SQLite, and MySQL is the worst of the lot. No, PostgreSQL isn't a holy grain, but any user of MySQL would overall be better served by PostgreSQL; especially on AWS where the replication is so simple to set up, which IMO is the only good argument I've heard in favor of MySQL (but I hear even that is fraught with peril).
MySQL is so completely riddled with bugs and utterly baffling behavior — it is the PHP of relational DBs. What I remember off the top of my head includes attempting to subtract datetimes causing the punctuation to be removed from the datetimes and the resulting "integers" to be subtracted, FK integrity being violated in a number of easy-to-hit corner cases, the "utf8" encoding not being able to encode UTF-8 (and the default being latin1…), GROUP BY allowing obviously (i.e., catchable to the parser) broken queries, `SELECT * FROM table` on <10k row tables taking minutes in some cases, the SQL dialect swapping the words "key" and "index" inappropriately; Read [1] if you want more.
Thus far the only other tool I've seen come close to this level of insanity is MongoDB. The thing about a tool so willfully discards any sort of reasoned approach to its topic area is that the people who use it — who inevitably are not well versed in how a relational database works "in theory" — cannot derive from its behavior its rules, because its behavior is irrational, bordering on psychotic, and the people using it tweak query after query while having no understanding of why one query might work better until some abomination that someone usually works is crafted; `-- Don't touch`. A good tool — I believe, somewhere deep inside me — will teach the novice user. MySQL will not; it will drive you insane.
It should be noted that most Database supported by cloud providers are actually MySQL (compatible) database. While Amazon supports a managed Postgres Database as well, I would bet that their own MySQL database – Amazon Aurora – works best because it integrated best into the AWS eco system. Same goes for Google, unlike Amazon, the only managed Database they offer is a MySQL database (called Cloud SQL).
I'm not disagreeing with your arguments (quite the opposite in fact), but that might be an important point to use MySQL over Postgres.
