Re:The Great Migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
by kstrauser on Friday March 29, 2024 @10:53AM
(#39864794)
That mirrors my experience. MySQL was faster for use cases where data loss was acceptable. Will anyone die if you lose some web log analysis stats? Probably not. You wouldn’t want to use it for anything where guaranteed consistency was critical, like anything involving money, but it was an alright replacement for things like an in-memory data store.
I say “was”. I hear it’s vastly better now.
The MySQL performance advantages were large, with the small caveat that it was fast as long as you were using MyISAM, which achieved its speed by throwing away many safety features, like working transactions and foreign key constraints. Unsurprisingly, when eventually it got an engine that didn't throw caution to the wind, the performance advantage went away.
I spent a lot of time in the early 2000s showing people whose that many of the issues they were facing with their e-commerce websites were ultimately down to the MySQL engine they had picked. But it's faster! Yes it is, but now your application code has to deal with all the things the engine has now offloaded to your application code.
It's not that Postgres' changes were key to increasing market share, but that as MySQL matured, it had no options but to lose its 'advantages'.