zlacker

>>andren+(OP)
I must admit as a web practitioner since 1994 I have a bit of an issue with this:

> In the 2000s, the conventional wisdom selected MySQL because rising tech stars like Google and Facebook were using it. Then in the 2010s, it was MongoDB because non-durable writes made it “webscale“. In the last five years, PostgreSQL has become the Internet’s darling DBMS. And for good reasons!

Different DB's, different strengths and it's not a zero sum came as implied. MySQL was popular before Google was born - we used it heavily at eToys in the 90s for massive transaction volume and replacing it with Oracle was one of the reasons for the catastrophic failure of eToys circa 2001. MongoDB gained traction not because it's an alternative to MySQL or PostgreSQL. And PostgreSQL's marketshare today is on a par with Mongo and both are dwarfed by MySQL which IMO is the true darling of web DB's given it's global popularity.

>>mmaund+uo
A non-trivial component to MySQL popularity was that easy installation (not necessarily administration) and comparatively low resource usage with good performance at default settings (even today one needs to run some basic calculations for postgres in production, IMO) meant that cheapest possible dynamic hosting using Linux, Apache, PHP3, and MySQL 3, was what simply was the only available option for many. This codified LAMP stack, people learned from tutorials/courses/word of mouth how to write web apps with PHP and MySQL, used cheap LAMP hosting, optionally installed LAMP servers themselves, etc.

This also led to popularity of bigger reselling setups (I don't miss installing cpanel...) and services like Dreamhost.

MySQL in this way gained a virtuous cycle completely unrelated to Google. Hell, most people I know, who dealt with LAMP space for years, never knew Google had anything to do with MySQL (most people that knew about it were... Lispers. Because of who built the first version of Google Ads)

Even Mac OS X Server shipped with MySQL and PHP because of that, in 2001.

>>p_l+L01
Another factor besides performance vs earlier versions of Postgres (they're now more at parity) was Postgres didn't come with replication included. I think that was a big hinderance for adoption during the LAMP stack's hey day.

>>jasonw+Ic1
Honestly, at the time when LAMP was gaining the userbase, said userbase for considerable portion did not care about replication because there was only one server they had.

Replication was something you did when you got succesful enough to have it, or were a MSP providing it at premium to others.

>>p_l+Vc1
I remember it differently - we needed replication for "hot" backups. At that time, scalability was a major issue - so anyone (including businesspeople) wanted to have a scalable architecture. MySQL spoke to the practical (default install on cPanel hosts, easy replication) and the aspirational (you're going to blow up and need to scale).

Digg.com also had a really influential technical team - hearing about how they did things set a lot of baseline defaults for a lot of people.

>>edmund+jl1
maybe you were on the more funded side of history in this. As for me, Digg is way after LAMP got solidly plonked into "what I need for a dynamic website on cheap".

Essentially, start at 2000-2001 and more and more people going into running websites for all kinds of reasons (forums, blogs, webshops, etc. often hosted on low end offerings)