Posted by Stephen Gordon on 09/26/05 14:39

smorrey@gmail.com wrote:
> I've been thinking on this long and hard, and I can't seem to come up
> with an answer on it.
>
> Why is it almost always assumed the MySQL will be the server for nearly
> any PHP app?
>
> Why is it MySQL and not PostGRES or SQLite?
>
> At this point the only reason I can think of is that MySQL has a much
> more friendly name. But is that really it?
>

MySQL is popular because most hosts have it, most hosts have it because
it is popular (as alluded to by another poster).

Postgresql is very nice but at the end of the day useless if you don't
always have a host you can control (most ISP friendly setups like cpanel
etc. I think bundle MySQL).

> Is there some winning advantage that MySQL has over PostGRES that makes
> it the de-facto standard in the PHP world?

It was on both major host platforms first (to my knowledge), it also
works out of the box extremely easily, even if sometimes it's integrity
constraints are somewhat lacking. From my personal experience I also
found the MySQL documentation hits Postgres out of the park. The fact
that it is easy to learn and has great doco is probably what made it the
optimum choice for most hosts in the first place.

>
> Just curious, because I've been playing with PostGRES for about a month
> now and it seems to scale MUCH better than MySQL, what with
> clustering,transactions and all that jazz.

If you use the right table type I'm pretty sure MySQL has had
transactions for a fair while. Same deal goes with most of it's other
'failings', it is however rather unfortunate that the default table type
doesn't support a lot of things (and more disappointing that things like
views are only just being added).

Anyway basically I can't see postgres being deployed on run of the mill
web hosts any time soon, most of them are still running the 3.23.*
strand of MySQL.

Cheers,

Steve

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