Top 5 Reasons People Dismiss PostgreSQL

Jane Walker writes "In an effort to dispel some of the FUD surrounding this impressive product, this article puts forth several of the most commonplace reasons for a user to dismiss PostgreSQL." From the article: "While PostgreSQL's adoption rate continues to accelerate, some folks wonder why that rate isn't even steeper given its impressive array of features. One can speculate that many of the reasons for not considering its adoption tend to be based on either outdated or misinformed sources."

Comments

Web developers...

[schon]

I think first and foremost is that is web developers who don't understand SQL, and so go about happily re-inventing its functionality in their web apps.

99% of the problems that web developers face have already been solved for them, but they think that SQL is just a data dump, and thus see no reason to use Postgres, because they think that MySQL does everything they need. In reality, their apps would be faster to write and easier to maintain if they used SQL features.

It's kind of like perl-syndrome, but on a larger scale.

Interesting article, but not the reasons I hear

[dskoll]

I don't hear those reasons when people dismiss PostgreSQL. The ones I hear are:

• VACUUM is a pain. It's true that VACUUM is annoying, but later releases (especially 8.0 and 8.1) make VACUUM much more tolerable; we have customers whose databases are busy 24/7, and although the load does go up during a VACUUM, the database is still perfectly usable.
• PostgreSQL is slow. That was true, but the 8.x series has improved performance dramatically.
• PostgreSQL is hard to install and administer. Really, I think this is a matter of taste. If you are used to MySQL, then yes, there is a learning curve. OTOH, I'm used to PostgreSQL and find myself having to learn MySQL, and MySQL feels just as weird and unintuitive to me as PostgreSQL might to a long-time PostgreSQL user.

Re:Reason number 6

[dj-nix]

Well, thats funny, because I also have had to write VoIP billing software, and am currently writing IP traffic rating and billing software. When I first started this type of business 5 years ago it was with MySQL, but I was frequently both crashing MySQL and getting junk data in my tables (The biggest problem being invalid dates!) When I started searching for a better option I tried a number of databases including FireBird and Postgresql but settled on Postgresql for 4 major reasons. 1) It has absolutely brilliant Date and Time handling, better even than Oracle. 2) It has native INET support which allows easy manipulation, sorting and searching of IP addresses. 3) It has SUB SELECT support which allowed me to reduce my application code a lot, by making the DB do the work (Always a good tradeoff in my opinion) 4) It has VIEW support which allowed me to generate some "simple" views of the data including some summaries which allowed the management to play to their hearts content with MS Access (As a frontend to PG) without having to understand the "real" data layout.
Of course since then I have discovered many more things to love about Postgresql, including triggers and stored procedures etc (To be fair, MySQL has some of these features now, but did not at that time)
Just to be clear my first Postgresql app handled ~5 million VoIP records per day on a single CPU, single disk desktop class machine and the only time I have EVER had Postgresql crash was due to a bad ram chip in server! Conversely, I can't count the number of time I and my customers have lost data with MySQL.