zlacker

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+(OP)
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+Xb
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+ac
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+yk
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)

>>p_l+Ul
I didn't enter the workforce until 2004, so yeah missed some of the early early days of PHP/MySQL. I used it for government work, was definitely not well funded haha! But I suspect digg started with MySQL b/c of similar reasons as anyone else, then helped amplify the cycle.

>>p_l+Ul
"Cheap" is the key word here, and that usually meant shared hosting, which was like 99% MySQL.