Linked by snydeq on Thu 21st May 2009 22:55 UTC

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Member since:
2007-06-07
@TechGeek
"I am not an expert but there must be reasons why people chose MySQL over Postgres. There are some very big groups using MySQL technology when they could have gone the other way. Why?"
There isn't a specific reason that I can see. At least not a logical one. Instead it seems that people who are choosing MySQL are doing so because they don't use much if any of the traditional RDMS features, choosing to instead use application level APIs to provide similar RDMS style functionality. This is good for the application developer in the sense that they are not tied to a specific database vendor per-se.
Take Facebook for example. Lead engineers have stated specifically that they don't care that the data be consistent at all times. They understand that they work in terms of time zones, geographic locations, etc, so if a user doesn't see all the updated information right away who cares.
This thinking isn't bad, but much of the functionality that Oracle, Sybase, PostgreSQL or MySQL just doesn't matter when you develop like this.