MySQL vs PostgreSQL: Part 1

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I have watched the progress of PostgreSQL for a while now and read the recent updates for the 9.5 release. I was impressed at the amount and depth of features that are in PostgreSQL.

Coming originally from an Oracle DBA background I tend to appreciate what features are missing in MySQL. MySQL in some respects benefited from a network effect from being the M part in the LAMP stack. But that is pretty much history now.

So how much difference is there between MySQL and PostgreSQL?

Many of the search results whilst good on pagerank are dated and old.

Here is the good page from wikipedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_relational_database_management_systems

Pretty good comparison page,

https://www.wikivs.com/wiki/MySQL_vs_PostgreSQL

A presentation of modern SQL using PostgreSQL

After all this I decided to consult with the magic mirror…

Mirror, mirror on the wall.
Who is the fairest database of all?

SQLServervsMySQLvsPostgreSQLvsOracleDB

Turns out MySQL still is the fairest, but all the main relational/SQL databases have trended down over time.

Javascript, Node.js ,JSON and hence JSON datastores such as MongoDB are trending up from a very low base. So NoSQL is still kicking along fine. News of the death of NoSQL are over-stated.

I came to the conclusion that back in ’em olden days of the web, back in ’04, the searches were far more technical. By 2015 those type of searches have been overwhelmed by searches such as fb and facebook.

So my question remains partially un-answered. Yes MySQL is still clearly the most searched for term in relation to SQL databases, JSON related stuff is trending up. But in terms of overall search traffic all database related searches are going down.
An interesting sidenote, both MySQL and PostgreSQL have added JSON datatypes recently, so both databases are trying to adapt to the changes driven by trend to interactive webpages controlled by javascript.

In the end I came to the conclusion that I need to spend more time with PostgreSQL specifically its biggest feature gap it had with MySQL until recently i.e. replication.

Until next time…