MySQL

Long-term owners

If MySQL and Postgresql had been acceptables choices 25 years ago, our company at the time would've saved SO MUCH money

Dec 2025 · comment

What hackers pick instead

• PostgreSQLA free, open-source relational database people trust for nearly everything (queues, JSON, search, vectors) and run for years; critics cite query planner limits and horizontal scaling difficulty.816recommend
• Microsoft SQL ServerRecommended as a batteries-included, hands-off database with strong tooling, documentation and a free Express edition. Main caveat is per-core licensing cost.73recommend
• Microsoft AccessLets non-developers build working database apps with forms and VBA quickly. Common caveat: it does not scale well and its apps become hard to maintain.62recommend
• TursoOpen-source, MIT-licensed SQLite-compatible database in Rust, with async I/O, concurrent writes, and a managed cloud option. Most common caveat: unproven stability and ties to the company's future.53recommend
• MariaDBFree open-source database praised for its feature set, openness and production use. Critics most often question the corporate ownership and its drift from MySQL.40recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 281 comments. Each links to the original.

1. you can run Postgres/MySQL locally, on even the tiniest cheapest VPS, basically just as easily as using SQLite

   Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File”

2. they maintained binary table format compatibility across major version upgrades the vast majority of the time

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you”

3. MySQL had decent binlog replication starting in 2000 which made up for a lot of the horrible warts it had

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email”

4. More mature logical replication (fully supports DDL, has no concept of limited "replication slots", etc)

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “No More Hidden Changes: How MySQL 9.6 Transforms Foreign Key Management”

5. Upgrades also seem easier in MySQL. That said, it does seem to be stagnating relative to Postgres.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”

6. for many simple needs MySQL is simpler than Postgres, with similar performance and consistency.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “PostgreSQL for Everything”

7. MySQL is definitely easier to use if you don’t want to ever have to think about DB maintenance

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “It's 2026, Just Use Postgres”

8. I'll take the worse solution with better performance and a better replication story any day.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “RIP, vector database”

9. MySQL was also potentially faster as it did not implement all features of the SQL standard.

   Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “PostgreSQL for Everything”

10. You can get an insane amount of performance out of a well-tuned MySQL or Postgres instance

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “A $1k AWS mistake”

11. MySQL performs well at large scale, and has a very cool and weird storage engine option

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Stop using MySQL in 2026, it is not true open source”

12. mysql was great in 2000 if you knew all the foot guns to avoid and set it up correctly

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Oracle slashes 30k jobs with a cold 6 a.m. email”

13. There are rumblings that the MySQL project is rudderless after Oracle fired the team working on the open-source project in September 2025.

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Databases in 2025: A Year in Review”

14. they can bring even the biggest deployment of Postgres/MySQL to its knees pretty fast with relatively simple queries

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “UUIDv7: Timestamps aren’t time-ordered and other oddities”

15. Too many people discovered databases with MySQL back in the day and didn't even know transactions were possible.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Do we fear the serializable isolation level more than we fear subtle bugs?”

16. Even if there were no codepoints in the 4-byte range yet, they could and should have implemented it anyway.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “MySQL Foreign Key Cascade Operations Hit the Binary Log”

17. transactions processing an row locks across the network limit you to 1-3k TPS that you cannot scale out of

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

18. if you have a business and it is investing into MySQL, your business is set for failure in the near future

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Google Cloud: Investing in the Future of PostgreSQL”

19. it would go too high for the single-threaded replication in mysql at the time to keep up with the master

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Scaling PostgreSQL to power 800M ChatGPT users”

20. Again, they absolutely should have addressed it sooner. But people make mistakes, especially as we're talking about a venture-funded startup in the years right after the dot-com crash.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “MySQL Foreign Key Cascade Operations Hit the Binary Log”

21. pluggable storage introduces a lot of extra internal complexity, which has arguably been quite detrimental to the software's evolution

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?”

22. If MySQL and Postgresql had been acceptables choices 25 years ago, our company at the time would've saved SO MUCH money

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?”

23. innodb_thread_concurrency setting that applies for internal operations to prevent exactly kinds of issues like these

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Postgres locks do not scale”

24. It's a foot gun, but not a common one in production at any real scale where you'd have a replica in the first place.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “A safe MySQL upgrade that wasn't so safe”

25. Having secondary indexes point the primary key enables things like undo logging, which obviates the need for vacuums

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “RIP, vector database”

26. It also continues to scale into MySQL/Postgres if your little local projects start to outgrow or become more formal

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “SQLite is all you need for durable workflows”

27. It does better since it doesn’t do oldest-to-newest tuple chains, but it’s still adding non-trivial work to the DB

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE”

28. they were very quick to get started, covered what was needed, and no risk of price spikes or time consuming audits

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?”

29. Most companies would be best served picking MySQL or PG and only adding something else if absolutely necessary.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled”

30. the backend team managed to move to MySQL (by that time I had moved to Ops) and the difference was abysmal

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”

31. mysql doesn't seem to suffer from a lot of the tricky issues, corner cases and footguns that postgres has

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “Vacuum Is a Lie: About Your Indexes”

32. If the defaults are more secure than your examples, it's not fair to blame the database or the defaults.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs”

33. Oracle has been making real progress towards making the MySQL project more open and community-oriented.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “MySQL's New Governance Model: Two steps forward and one step backwards”

34. The beauty of MySQL based servers is the internal extensibility where Postgres is still rather lacking.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “A new write and space optimized storage engine for MySQL is here”

35. For MySQL, you can get the first auto-incrementing integer created from your INSERT from the cursor.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Why Strong Consistency?”

36. most opinions are based on setups over a decade old, with little to no bearing on how it runs today

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “MySQL Foreign Key Cascade Operations Hit the Binary Log”

37. The join strategies supported before 8.0 (5.7 and lower) were basically nested loop and that's it.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “RIP, vector database”

38. IME MariaDB doesn't recover or run as reliably as modern versions of MySQL, at least with InnoDB.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres”

39. "Dead" according to this site, risen from the dead under Oracle for those who actually know it.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Project Valhalla, Explained: How a Decade of Work Arrives in JDK 28”

40. MySQL presentations on the other hand (a) showed code and (b) were often given by the authors.

    Mixed · Dec 2025 · in “'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay”