> 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.
I think this is the best video on that topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
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.
...Along with replication and being joined with the hip to PHP. As to installation, there was a point in time in the early 2000s where you could sudo to root, type 'mysql' and be talking to a live MySQL on most Linux distros that I used. No wonder a lot of people defaulted to it.
A "darling" is something you want to use, not something that you are using. Many do not want to use MySQL due to Oracle control. Postgres is definitely the darling of the past few years.
Honestly I think it only gained traction because many Node devs refused to learn SQL and the document model is familiar because it's closer to JSON data.
These days Mongo is good but that wasn't the case back 10+ years ago.
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
sudo -i mysql
EDIT: Of course, at that time, there was no Ubuntu teaching everyone to sudo all the time, so drop all instances of sudo and add a su - at start ;)
Replication was something you did when you got succesful enough to have it, or were a MSP providing it at premium to others.
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.
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)
They were absolute liars of the first water back in the day, absolutely. In the 3.x era there were claims that transactions were only for people who didn't know how to program! You'd struggle to find most of the absolute nonsense that was being pushed, because it's mostly gone down various memory holes, but it was absolutely breathtaking.
Disagree. It gained traction because it was an alternative to MySQL in the ways that mattered - fast, easy to administer, widely known, good enough. Yes, there are significant differences in the details of what they do - but in terms of someone looking for a backing datastore for their webapp, they're actually competing in a very similar space.
I think Mongo became popular because it's ad tech and those guys knew how to be buzzword compliant. JSON-esque documents are one thing, but Mongo is Javascript to the core. All of a sudden your JS devs don't have to learn SQL they can just shit out some queries in javascript. Of course that came with some pretty severe drawbacks.
did google even use mysql? certainly if they did they never talked about it publicly in the early 02000s, and of course facebook didn't even exist then
lj, though, they used the fuck out of mysql
/. originally didn't use a database; i (an ordinary user) accidentally posted an article by trying to post a comment on an article that didn't exist yet; i guess they got appended to the same file. but when it did switch to a database (i don't know, about the time google was founded?) it was of course mysql
Maybe that's why I am used to logging in as root rather than a user. I started in 1999 and have been surprised how few users now do
$ ssh user@server <rsa key> $ sudo -i <user pass> #
We first used Mongo ~11 years ago with Java. For us the benefit was that we could dump unstructured data into it quickly, but still run queries / aggregations on it later.
I recall doing an evaluation of open source databases in 2001. MySQL didn't even have row-level locking, let alone any concept of transactions. I summarised it as "easy to use; but only for data you don't care about".
* Not that Postgres (as it was then) was without warts in 2001. A huge one was its "object orientation": table inheritance. What it needed then, and would still be nice to have, is object orientation at data type (column) level, an extension of the SQL domain.
I'd wish PostgreSQL would have as simple when it comes to replication and failover like MySQL does. It's always a pain when switching masters back and forth.
Would love to hear a from-the-trenches summary of that.
I remember people stating that transactions are useless, and maybe they are for some workloads, see the success of MongoDB years later.
The transactional engine InnoDB was added in version 3.23 [1] in 2001 [2] .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MySQL_database_e...