I don’t intend to start a flame war between MySQL and PostgreSQL fans but I would just like to tell you my experience using both database servers. I first started to use MySQL maybe 8 years ago when MySQL was still at version 3.23. It took me a few days to figure out what a database is and how to use MySQL. I started to use PostgreSQL when I installed an accounting software (SQL Ledger) for a client.

What I like about MySQL is that it just works almost immediately with little, if any, adjustments to be made on the server side. On the other hand, PostgreSQL requires a system username to somehow become important to the database user namespace. This I find quite confusing at the start because I was probably used to the MySQL security system wherein the database users are totally independent of the system’s user names.

These days I like to simplify my work so I’m sticking to MySQL for most of my projects becaues I’m more comfortable with MySQL. I’m only using PostgreSQL for SQL-Ledger. So far I haven’t had the need for any other features other than those available on MySQL. By the way, there are tons of applications using a combination of PHP and MySQL (this blog website, for example) so I’m hoping in the long run, I should be able to do most of what I need to do with this combination.