I have learned SQL with Postgres, provided by my university, and found the "explain analyze" and "explain cost" to be a god-send :-) Especially when I was trying to learn the impact of various things on the query-execution time.

When I used MYSQL, I found its EXPLAIN counterpart much more rudimentary.

But if I were to teach somebody SQL, I would probably just use sqlite because it just uses a simple binary file as a backend and doesn't need a running process :)

I am not really OPS or DB guy, so I can't comment on meirts of the databases in production.

Yes - it seems that MySQL is easier to set started with and there is more information available online. Also a lot of cheap hosting uses MySQL which is plus for hobby projects.

More like, a lot of garbage outdated tutorials available online. Copy and paste to get SQL injection vulnerabilities! Easy!

Seriously, what is "not easy" about Postgres? Just read the official documentation, which is actually readable and good.

About hobby hosting… there is Heroku Postgres, but no Heroku MySQL. (There are third party addons for everything, yeah). Cheap shared Apache hosting is TERRIBLE. It should NOT be used for any new projects.

Yeah. Popularity and the ability to work at cheap horrible apache hosting companies all the way to big bad facebook does speak volumes, doesn't it? :-)