What would we do without postgres? How does anyone justify another SQL DB these days?
You sure know how to bring up the elephant in the room. But mysql is decent enough too, not my favourite, but good enough.
Mariadb, maybe.
Good pun
It certainly was a strong competitor fifteen years ago. If only they kept pace
We use SQL Server at work and I really don’t get why. It’s so expensive. We’re hosting it on AWS as well. I can’t remember the numbers but it’s several times more than a similarly specced postgres and we’re only using Standard edition.
I don’t think we’re really using any features that would stop us moving over, it’s really just inertia and in-house knowledge.
Sounds like an opportunity to be the shepherd of change that saves the company money.
Beware of one-trick database admins (if you have those) and salespeople who earn their living fighting such changes.
Yeah I’ve been dropping not very subtle hints. We’re only a small company, about 25 people. We don’t have any dedicated database admins at all.
It’s on the list I think but we don’t have the people to spare to get it done.
I’ve heard that it doesn’t scale well. Something to do with the vacuum process? I don’t remember. Personally, I don’t really buy it.
Can you elaborate? I’m deciding on what type of SQL to use for my lab and am thinking about MySQL. Should we reconsider?
I don’t know exactly what environment you’re working, but Postgres has a reputation as the best DBMS to work with from a developer’s perspective. I definitely feel that way, at least.
What type of lab are you working in, and what other technologies do you work with?
I’m the director of technology for a neurology lab, where we collect patient health record data in a variety of disparate machines and modalities (e.g., MRI, EEG, physical functioning, retinal scans, etc.). We’ve been using the open-source database software REDCap (basically a wrapper for MySQL that enables easy GUI-based data entry), but we are reaching the limits of what it can handle and need something that can scale with our growing database.
I have little experience in database management myself, but I am a competent programmer and feel comfortable learning whatever is needed (famous last words, I know).
I have experience running both at global scale (self managed, AWS RDS & GCP CloudSQL). Developer experience = postgres, management/sysadmin = MySQL/maria
We use DB2, but mostly because we call it from a mainframe.
