On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 10:50 AM, martharotter <martharot...@gmail.com>wrote:
> I was advised recently to port my startup's Django databases from postgres > to mysql for two reasons: > > 1) RDS on Amazon makes it your life much easier > 2) When I need to scale my web app and have to hire people to help me, it > will be much easier to find solid mysql people than postgres people. > > Any thoughts on these? Are they legitimate concerns? It's always a pain to > migrate, but I guess if it's worth doing I'd rather do that now when it > makes less of an impact. > > Qualifying my remarks by saying that I don't know any of the specifics of your situation, I'd advise that whoever told you this gave you some pretty bad advice. 1) Picking a database because *one* vendor supplies a product supporting it seems, to me, to be particularly short sighted. Lets say Amazon decides to discontinue RDS tomorrow. Or that over the next 12 months, reliability of the RDS decreases. You're now stuck with using MySQL because the of a choice made over a vendor that you're no longer using. Pick the technology, then pick a vendor. 2) If you ever hit the point where serious scaling is a problem, you're going to want to take control of your own database admin anyway. Again: vendor choice is irrelevant. 3) If you're interested in using "Database as a service" to avoid administration headaches, there are vendors who provide PostgreSQL as a service -- the biggest that jumps to mind is Heroku, but I'm sure there are others. 4) I know MySQL use is widespread, but then, so is PHP use. That doesn't mean MySQL/PHP is good. 5) Just as with PHP, being more popular *does* mean that there is a larger available "talent" pool. However, it also means that there's a much bigger "shallow end" on that talent pool -- i.e., people who *think* they know what they're doing, but in reality are just charging a lot for mediocre advice. 6) There may well be *more* MySQL experts in the world than PostgreSQL experts, but that doesn't mean there aren't any PostgreSQL experts. Any halfway competent engineer will be able to adapt from MySQL to PostgreSQL *very* quickly, especially if they're using Django as a proxy layer; I doubt you'd have any difficulty finding PostgreSQL talent to solve any complex problems that arise. If someone can make a legitimate technical argument for a reason why MySQL is better suited to your *specific* circumstances, then by all means take that advice. However, taking advice to pick MySQL because of a vendor or perceived availability of talent would be a poor decision, IMHO. Personally -- I cannot count the ways that I consider PostgreSQL to be technically superior to MySQL. I've spent many many hours working with both Postgres and MySQL. In my experience, when something fails or performs badly on Postgres, it's usually for reasons that make some sort of sense. On the other hand, I measure my experience of working with MySQL in units of "WTFs/day" -- which translates directly to development time when you're trying to work out why something is working poorly. Yours, Russ Magee %-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en.
