Posted by Erwin Moller on 09/26/05 13:09

smorrey@gmail.com wrote:

> Actually I pretty much feel the same... My question I'm asking though
> is why MySQL? I just get the feeling that with it's prevailance that I
> must be missing something here, other than of course it seems to be the
> defacto standard.

Hi,

Well, it has probably everything to do with the fact that mySQL was working
on M$ machines, and Postgresql was not.
So everybody coming from M$ world picked mySQL, and even if they used it on
a webserver that runs GNU/Linux, they wanted mySQL because they knew it
already.

But Postgresql has been ported to M$ as well now, and works good I heard.
(I didn't try the M$-Postgresql thought myself...)

About a week ago I discovered that MySQL doesn't support FK constraints, and
I asked a similar question in this ng: "Why is mySQL so popular? It doesn't
even support basic stuff like FK???"

One of the answers I received said that it is possible with mySQL, in
certain setups: INNO-DB-tables.

Anyway: mySQL is popular because it was running everywhere and was open
sourced. Postgresql didn't run everywhere. (I always wondered why anybody
would bother to run a webserver under W$, but that is beside the point
here.)

Regards,
Erwin Moller

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