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Comment by justin_oaks

10 hours ago

> It really feels like early 1990s vintage Unix software. It's clunky and arcane and it's hard to feel confident doing anything complex with it.

How software "feels" is subjective. Can you be more specific?

12 comments

justin_oaks

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dalyons  9 hours ago

It requires a ton of somewhat arcane maintenance at scale. Vacuum shenanigans, Index fragmentation requiring manual reindexing, Txid wraparounds. I like Postgres but it’s definitely way more work to maintain a large instance than mysql. MySQL just kinda works

arkh  2 hours ago

Having to tinker with pg_hba.conf files on the server so manage how users can connect.

threeseed  10 hours ago

The command line experience is old school style i.e. to show tables.

  \c database
  \dt

Versus:

  use database
  show tables

  • georgyo  9 hours ago

    I started with MySQL in 2006 for my personal projects, but what first won me over to psql was those commands.

    Today I use CLIs like usql to interact with MySQL and SQLite so I can continue to use those commands.

    At first glance they may be less obvious, but they are significantly more discoverable. \? Just shows you all of them. In MySQL it always feels like I need to Google it.

    • stephenr  6 hours ago

      > At first glance they may be less obvious, but they are significantly more discoverable. \? Just shows you all of them. In MySQL it always feels like I need to Google it.

      In MySQL either `?` or `help` or `\?` will show you the help...

  • rootusrootus  9 hours ago

    I assume this is really what it comes down to. If psql added those verbose-but-descriptive commands a whole bunch of people comfortable with mysql would be a lot happier using postgres.