Attacking MySQL, was Thoughs after discussions at OSCON - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Denis Lussier wrote:

> > We need to look at all the things that MySQL is doing right, because
> > our technical superiority alone is not going to save us. I've also
> > started to think lately that our BSD license may be an even greater
> > asset than our feature set. More about that later in a PP rant. :)
>
> I think that commercial interest in PostgreSQL is really picking up
> rather nicely.  PostgreSQL is generally accepted by techies (of all
> varieties) to be superior to MySQL and an increasingly worthy
> substitute for Oracle, DB2, & SQL Svr in many situations.
>
> Where MySQL has been "superior" is in marketing propaganda.   As more
> commercial companies, with marketing dollars, partner with the
> Postgres community...  I think the PG community will blow by MySQL in
> the coming eighteen months to become the "Most Advanced" AND the "Most
> Popular".  Additionally, these commercial companies should sponsor
> ever more full time PG community superstars so the pace of new
> enterprise-class features, in core PG, continues to quicken.

One point I may have mentioned before is that although many people have
voiced concern over MySQL gaining enough developer marketshare to
overtake PostgreSQL, I actually see the opposite happening today.  MySQL
did a number of things right, and in these areas I believe we have
already surpassed them.

I worked with PostgreSQL 6.5 for a while and I found it a real pain to
work with during the prototyping phase.  I couldn't just make a chance
and test things out, so I did all my prototyping and schema review in
MySQL and then once I had my design down the way I wanted it, would
reimpliment it in PostgreSQL.  One of the things MySQL did right early
on was focus on user experience.  Today, PostgreSQL is far easier to use
(IMO) that MySQL and has a choice of far more powerful front-ends than
MySQL.

I personally think that MySQL's current market standing is supported
primarily by two factors: marketing and market inertia.  Instead our
market standing is based on a rapid pace of development (far outpacing
MySQL) and community involvement.  We are not at risk of being
relegating to a niche role.  As evidence, I might point out that they
used to be critical of us because we were adding features too fast (not
really noting that the features were parts of the relevant standards).

So the question becomes "How do we attack MySQL?" rather than "How do we
defend against MySQL?"   I think that there are several things that can
be done.

The first is to help port MySQL-based FOSS projects to PostgreSQL.  My
company (http://www.metatrontech.com) offers this service for such
applications and are working on developing porting environments which
could be re-used in this process where database abstraction layers were
not used to start with.  These porting environments will be modular and
released to the community.  This is important because the real advantage
that a customers get with PostgreSQL is that they can use the database
to integrate applications and analyze data across application
boundaries.  Triggers and views can provide further integration options
which will not provide the same level of power in MySQL for the
forseable future.  Providing customers the option of running apps on
PostgreSQL would be a very good start.  From there, it will be much
easier to make sure that PostgreSQL is the default database manager
supported by web hosting provider.

The web-hosting/ecommerce market is a very important market for us to
attack, not just because of MySQL, but also because the alternative
often is MS SQL Server.  Attacking MySQL in this market is therefore
also moving up to further threaten MS SQL in one of their markets.

The second area is relatively obvious and we are doing it anyway.  MySQL
got away with being light and simple but now they are trying to grow
up.  This means that they are both tied to bad ways of doing things due
to backward compatibility requirements and are outgrowing their
simplicity advantage ("Learn MySQL in 10 minutes").  We need to try to
help convince people that the additional time spent learning PostgreSQL
will be an advantage to them.  We particularly need to reach out to FOSS
projects and try to help them appreciate the benefits to building on
PostgreSQL.  I would note that this would be greatly accelerated by the
porting of apps from MySQL to PostgreSQL.  But the way to do this is to
have PostgreSQL advocates get involved in FOSS projects which are MySQL
only.

Finally, we need to start preparing some community documentation about
general database principles (not PostgreSQL specific).  We need to turn
ourselves into the place that Newbies should go if they want to learn
about databases as a whole.  I would be happy to help with this but I am
not really sure how much time I can devote to that at the moment.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Metatron Technology Consulting