All of the bullets in this section highlight the similarities between MySQL and PostgreSQL. To ensure the availability of a high-performance, open-source relational database, Michael Widenius forked MySQL in 2009 to create MariaDB. Both MySQL and MariaDB are still extremely popular in 2023.

MongoDB is easily combined with different database management systems, both SQL and NoSQL types. To make a long story short, this option allows third parties to build their own data storage engines for MongoDB. From a commercial point of view, it creates extra value for business software. PostgreSQL is the leading open-source database system and powers thousands of websites, services and applications. In other words, it offers atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability features. PostgreSQL’s advanced features include stored procedures, triggers, user-defined functions, transactions and replication.

Server

According to the survey published by StackOverflow, MySQL is repeatedly the most used database technology among developers. According to the StackOverflow “2021 Developers Survey” linked above, PostgreSQL is the second most-used database technology behind MySQL – and it’s rising steadily. Because while only about 26% of developers used it in 2017, it was already 34% in 2019 and by 2021 it was even more than 40%. Setting up, managing or using a database is only possible through a data management system such as PostgreSQL or MySQL.

Many companies are migrating their databases from expensive legacy DBMSs like Oracle to less expensive open source alternatives such as Postgres and MySQL. According to Gartner, 70% of greenfield application development projects by 2022 are built on open source DBMSs instead of costly legacy databases. The scalability of a database system is directly dependent on the ability to compress data. Ideally, database systems must have advanced, off-the-shelf compression techniques. In some database systems, developers have to compress manually, which is not only time-consuming but also inefficient. PostgreSQL provides it for free and the whole process is automatic.

How to choose a database management system

This allows for enlarging the database to the fullest extent. Total reliance and dependency on the application memory is a real drawback. That is to say, your database will crash if its size exceeds the size of available memory.

For instance, if you need to add numbers to produce aggregate results, ClickHouse’s SummingMergeTree engine will dramatically parallelize the process. Alternatively, if you need to average data, the AggregatingMergeTree is your dear friend. ClickHouse’s documentation is a tad confusing to readers unfamiliar with OLAP databases. This is because ClickHouse makes usage recommendations based on the reader’s expected goals. Postgres would need to incrementally retrieve every entry, grab the transaction price, add it to a running total, and return the value.

Pros of MySQL

In addition to calling functions written in the native PL/pgSQL, triggers can also invoke functions written in other languages like PL/Python or PL/Perl. In addition, users can create their own data types which can usually be made fully indexable via PostgreSQL’s indexing infrastructures – GiST, GIN, SP-GiST. Examples of these include the geographic information system (GIS) data postgresql performance solutions types from the PostGIS project for PostgreSQL. In PostgreSQL, a schema holds all objects, except for roles and tablespaces. Schemas effectively act like namespaces, allowing objects of the same name to co-exist in the same database. By default, newly created databases have a schema called public, but any further schemas can be added, and the public schema isn’t mandatory.

PostgreSQL has transaction support, full-text search and constraints like a foreign key. This RDBMS also has special features intended to help build high-performance systems. Thus, PostgreSQL can scale from one computer to thousands of computers in an enterprise deployment. Companies need to look at other, perhaps less technical, factors besides performance and current software versions to choose a technology for their software development projects. Successful companies think and plan for the long term, which is how their software solutions should be developed.

• Since there are no wrong answers here, it boils down to context.
• Cassandra’s simple syntax has the best of SQL and NoSQL.
• Because most companies that invest in an online analytical processing (OLAP) database like ClickHouse originally used an online transaction processing (OLTP) stack like MySQL or Postgres.
• Yet, for beginners, PgAdmin4, the graphical user interface (GUI), is both a popular and intuitive tool.

PostgreSQL also lacks a number of features that are useful for working with time series data like downsampling, retention policies, and custom SQL functions for time series data analysis. Extensibility is a software engineering principle that talks about future growth. PostgreSQL provides high extensibility as its operation is catalog-driven, i.e. information is stored in databases, columns, tables, etc. The just-in-time (JIT) compilation of expressions enables you to write your codes from different programming languages without recompiling your database and defining your data types.

Today I have demonstrated a comparison between PostgreSQL vs MySQL. Both database systems are the most popular because of their rich features, stability, and reliability. It depends on the user’s specific requirement to choose a specific database system. Data is stored in relational database management systems in row and column format. One set of data might also have a relation to other data within that database.