> The trends for the last 8 years are clear: Oracle and SQL Server are constantly declining in popularity; MySQL is slightly declining; and PostgreSQL is clearly growing in popularity. But while PostgreSQL almost tripled in popularity in these eight years, it is still far behind the other three.
It's great to see Postgres growing, but I often wonder why it isn't growing faster, especially when compared to MySQL. Without getting into a religious flame war, I'm curious what the HN thinks about that?
At my current gig, we've been burned pretty badly by scalability problems with MySQL, and the prevailing wisdom is that new functionality and services that have to deal with data at scale should be built on Cassandra. My cries of "we wouldn't have this problem with Postgres" have mostly fallen on death ears.
Can you elaborate on the specifics of the scalability problems, and how the different databases do differently on them? It's an interesting subject.
We're having scalability problems with our RDBMS, but it's something RDBMSs in general don't solve.
We have a few large (not large in the scheme of things, but large for MySQL) tables that we can't add columns to without locking the table for an extended period. In Postgres this operation is instant no matter the size of the table.
This not the only problem, but it is the most pernicious
Outside the context of db comparisons, and in relation to the specific case, if you don't have triggers/foreign keys on a given MySQL table, Gh-ost¹ solves the DDL locking issues.