Re: How to convince people to choose PostgreSQL over MySQL?

In a nutshell, what I usually say to people in advocating Postgres over MySQL is:

1. Postgres is a product from people that care a lot more about quality, making
releases that work and don't lose your data, and take care to keep changes
minimal and compatible in patch releases, unlike MySQL (all versions) which is
notorious for the opposite, see version 5.1 for example.

2. Postgres has an order of magnitude more useful features that MySQL lacks
(this being a major pain point for getting real work done), and they add lots of
useful new features each year; MySQL in contrast does very little in the way of
adding new features (version 5.1 was the last for-production version with
substantial new features), is very far behind, has a lot of mis-features.

I've given a lot more detail in the past, but that's a lot of it. The politics
of Oracle are another reason, but the above was all true even before Oracle
owned MySQL.

-- Darren Duncan

On 2017-06-09 11:58 AM, Tobias May wrote:
> Mellow Greetings all,
>
> I'm a junior DBA and PostgreSQL-enthusiast. Last year I switched to a
> company where they promised to me the opportunity to dive deeper into
> PostgreSQL.
>
> At that time there was a lead developer, who was a
> PostgreSQL-enthusiast, too. And there was an agreement that PostgreSQL
> is the primary database backend for our product. Unfortunately she has
> been frozen out by non-technical decision makers. Now there is only one
> colleague and me (without authority to decide) left to advocate PostgreSQL.
>
> Most of the developers in the company are used to MySQL. Although they
> seem to accept PostgreSQL some still subtly question the decision and
> I'm feeling, that I have to constantly defend the decision for PostgreSQL.
>
> To be prepared I tried to collect and refine as much hard evidence as
> possible, during the last couple of months, e.g,
> https://grimoire.ca/mysql/choose-something-else,
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emgJtr9tIME (some points are not valid
> anymore),
> http://insights.dice.com/2015/03/19/why-i-choose-postgresql-over-mysqlmariadb/,
> http://modern-sql.com/slides,
> PostgreSQL is community-driven (huge plus!),
> Oracle treats MySQL like a stepchild (understandably they don't want
> competitors for "Oracle DB"), etc.
>
> To me all these political and technical advantages of PostgreSQl over
> MySQL are more than enough. But the results don't feel "resilient"
> enough. It is also cumbersome to keep track of how far ahead PostgreSQL
> is in comparison of features and standards compliance and providing
> undeniable practical examples.
>
> Finally:
> How do I convince people to choose PostgreSQL over a MySQL?
> Alternatively:
> How do I cope with people, which refuse the available (too few?) facts?
>
> Thank you so much for this little gem called PostgreSQL. Keep up the
> great work.
>
>
> Be well,
>
> Tobias
>