I hope this drives developers towards using and improving Postgres, but, well, who knows. One can dream!

More likely is that it may drive people towards Percona, which I have on good word is a solid professional MySQL branch...or, like Java, people will just stick with the brand. :/

EDIT: adding links for the curious.

Percona: http://www.percona.com/

Background on the Java stuff: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/12/apache... (the difference is that MySQL never did have open governance, so there was nobody to quit in a justified huff)

Oracle has been nothing but a huge positive for the Java platform.

The closing down (of the JCP, the lawsuits, etc) in particular has been a little worrisome.

The time for that has come and gone. MySQL's shortcomings limit its use in many corporate and professional settings, and the alternatives are now much easier to use.

If I were looking to become a DBA today, I would study PostgreSQL. Likewise, if I were developing a new web application, MySQL wouldn't even make my list.

Which means that all of the really hard scalability and management problems have already been solved every which way. And all available for free by companies you know and trust e.g. Facebook, Twitter.

If I were looking to become a DBA today I wouldn't bother with PostgreSQL at all. I would learn all of the NoSQL databases because that is where all of the interest is right now. Due to the increase use of agile in software development databases need to be flexible with the schema controlled by developers not DBAs.

There's a hell of a lot of useful stuff to learn (practical and theoretical) from relational databases. NoSQL has some useful ideas too. However, advocating that someone wanting to be considered a "database administrator" only learn/focus on NoSQL - that's just poor advice.

Most DBAs will already know Oracle and MySQL and my point was that they would be much better advised learning a NoSQL database. Of course if you're a new DBA you should learn a relational database I just fail to see why on earth anybody would recommend PostgreSQL over Oracle/MySQL which are far, far, more popular.

That's what I was responding to. "looking to become a DBA" does not remotely imply someone who already "knows" Oracle and MySQL.

If you want a solid open-source database, especially one that has a future, learn Postgres.

So I guess if all of those clueless engineers at the world's most trafficked websites would have just listened to you they would never have picked MySQL. Have you ever thought of letting them know that they should switch over to PostgreSQL ?

If however you need to make a choice today for what database to use on a new project, then you should evaluate the choices instead of basing your decision on what might have been best for Facebook 8 years ago.

I'm not going to get into the technical differences here, because even if MySQL and Postgres were technically equivalent (and they aren't but I'll let you do your own research), I simply don't trust Oracle with the future of MySQL.

Speaking as a battle-scarred, proven old sage veteran of the DB wars? Because the opinions you state above don't really qualify you as that...

If you aren't interested in learning about MongoDB, MySQL, DB2, and stack of brittle punch cards, you're probably not cut out to be an IT professional in the first place.

And you're right. Scalability isn't everything hence the popularity of NoSQL which are far more developer friendly than current SQL databases. And in most companies it is the development teams that dictate technology choices.

1. Branding. First and foremost. MySQL had great documentation, an identifiable logo, and a wonderful name that every non-technical person could remember and identify. Postgresql is just, well, it's a horrible nightmare of a name. People would like to think this doesn't matter but: of course it does.

2. A really slick installer for Windows. You could say this is branding and to some extent it is, but MySQL and its admin tools have a really friendly installer that lets intermediate developers without a lot of DB experience get it up and running with their development environments quickly. I admit it's been a while since I used Postgres's but the fit and polish wasn't there.

I happen to think the postgres docs are great, and they are open and free unlike the MySQL docs. I have tried following one MySQL doc, only to see it change later and have no way to see the old version. Not a problem for postgres.

If you have some suggestions for the docs please submit them to the docs mailing list.

Postgres also has 15+ years of history in git, which is extremely helpful.

Honestly, I don't know where to start. Postgres is an open community project to the core and benefits from that in so many ways.

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/

Despite the reasons they gave, did they see the writing on the wall that made this the time to make the leap?

http://kb.askmonty.org/en/mariadb-case-studies/ (including Limelight networks)

Switching in early 2010 would have made you an early adopter.

My sense is that most sites use Percona Server instead of MariaDB, because Percona and xtradb (mods to innodb) have been around longer, and those changes are generally a subset of the changes MariaDB incorporates.

I'd love to apt-get purge mysql-server from my servers.

It looks like there are a ton of roll-your-own, but none as good as, say, "git svn clone"