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I was not thinking of Oracle here. PostgreSQL is free software and offers almost everything you expect from a real database.

So I guess the main reason people pay for Oracle is because they only know about MySQL and not about PostgreSQL.




You're probably right. I've never understood why Postgres has such a small mindshare. Between Postgres and SQLite, there ought to be no ecological niche for MySQL to exist...


MySQL does (did, at least; Postgres has been improving) replication better. Replication is really important for high availability, which almost everyone needs.

The irony, of course, is that a single Postgres server is frequently (IME) more reliable than multiple MySQL servers even when the latter is setup for HA.


In addition, replication is the next thing where PostgreSQL is vastly improving (according to their road map).

Also note that if you want to trade some of the ACID properties for better performance and replication, the so-called NoSQL databases (CouchDB etc) seem to be a better trade-off than, say, MySQL with MyISAM instead of InnoDB.




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