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Ask HN: Any one still using MySQL?

by aloknnikhil on 5/8/24, 2:58 PM with 21 comments

Do you manage your own MySQL installation? - If not, what managed provider do you use? - Either way, what’s your biggest pain point?

Why not Postgres?

  • by lemme_tell_ya on 5/8/24, 3:06 PM

    > Any one still using MySQL?

    Yes, but more so MariaDB

    > Do you manage your own MySQL installation?

    Yes and no, depends on the environment.

    > what managed provider do you use?

    RDS

    > what’s your biggest pain point?

    Nothing initially comes to mind.

    > Why not Postgres?

    Habit? It's what I learned with and just kept using. I understand it's permission model better than Postgres. I know how to back it up, restore, and replicate. At one time (not sure if this is still the case) it was noticeably cheaper than Postgres in AWS for our use cases.

    Some legacy systems can't be migrated to postgres even if we wanted.

    I've used Postgres and it has some nice features, especially with it's data types but often find myself lost with it's way of doing things. When possible I reach for SQLite instead of MySQL.

  • by cholmon on 5/8/24, 3:59 PM

    Yes, but MariaDB, mostly DIY on localhost (various test & live VMs I manage).

    Most painful? Replication with automatic failover could be easier to setup. Considering switching to MySQL 8.x for the new-ish innodb cluster tools (mysqlsh, mysql-router).

    Why not Postgres? Familiarity, mostly using it for Drupal & Wordpress sites where MySQL is king. Besides the occasional poorly-designed query that eats memory and causes timeouts, MySQL rarely needs my attention.

    Side note: I'm excited for https://github.com/mydumper/mydumper. Multi-threaded logical backups, 2 to 5 times faster than mysqldump. It's not super stable yet, so we haven't been relying on it for long term backups, but doing a "mydumper to grab a schema on live, rsync down to laptop, myloader to import" it's been a big time saver.

  • by rokkamokka on 5/8/24, 3:35 PM

    Still using mysql here for a medium large 10+ year old application. We self-host one master and two replicated slaves. Biggest pain point we've had is issues with locking and transaction timeouts as the application has gained users, but this isn't really mysqls fault.

    We've never seen the point of converting to postgres, a lot of work for little if any gain?

  • by jitl on 5/8/24, 4:01 PM

    I think Postgres has more features, MySQL has more scalability. Citus exists for Postgres but seems to have a much smaller community compared to MySQL active active replication or Vitess/Planetscale. I would probably pick Postgres for personal projects, but potentially consider MySQL/Planetscale for something that needs to hold petabytes.

  • by HeckFeck on 5/8/24, 3:37 PM

    Using MySQL for private infrastructure and using Postgres for our production app.

    No strong reasons for it, but I wanted to try psql after decades of toying with MySQL. I like it despite its weird insistence on snake case for everything.

  • by rietta on 5/8/24, 3:38 PM

    Yes. I prefer PostgreSQL but more than a few clients who were already built on MySQL are still using it or MariaDB. As for managed provider, typically AWS RDS, or a few are still directly hosted. MariaDB is easy to run natively for a small to medium site on a VPS.

    Biggest pain points are pretty much transactions around schema changes (Ruby on Rails context) meaning is possible to trash a database with changes that go wrong. Also implementing full text search is always a bit harder than it is with PostgreSQL. The capability is there but end up having to do custom queries.

  • by gmiller123456 on 5/8/24, 3:38 PM

    Of course. Why Postgres and not MySQL?

  • by geenat on 5/18/24, 3:03 PM

    Vitess

    Planetscale

    Lack of simple HA in Citus is a big pain point.

  • by pacifika on 5/8/24, 3:32 PM

    WordPress is not compatible with Postgres.

  • by alserio on 5/8/24, 5:54 PM

    mysql e pg have different performance characteristics, it is not trivial to migrate existing applications between them. Overall, MySQL 8 has gotten a lot better than it used to be. Sometimes the query planner can be a bit stupid on some complex queries, but that is true sometimes also for pg.

  • by slake on 5/9/24, 3:45 AM

    Not an answer to this question. Is there a Postgres.app equivalent for mysql on MacOs?

  • by nittanymount on 5/8/24, 3:01 PM

    seems it is still in many systems, guess database is not easy to migrate, and does not bother to if no real need...

  • by verdverm on 5/8/24, 4:53 PM

    yup, via Dolt (git+mysql)

  • by p2hari on 5/8/24, 4:30 PM

    hjskvh