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Don't do anything obviously complex with your RDBMS and migrations are free. If all you need is a few views, tables and FKs, then migration between RDBMS' should be low effort if you have a decent RSM or ORM to plug behind it. And even with more efforted things, I've written low-effort migrations from and to various RDBMS', it's not black magic.

The little time upfront is "use pgsql unless there is a good reason not to" as your first choice.



if you dont change schema dramatically, then it doesnt make much sense to migrate to another RDBMS, because most engines have pretty much similar query planner (if you not doing "anything obviously complex").

if you do migrate due to scaling issues, then the schema must evolve, for example: add in-memory db for caching, db sharding/partitioning, table partitioning, hot/cold data split, OLTP/OLAP split, etc.


Scaling issues can present themselves in numerous ways which may not require an in-memory DB, sharding/partitioning, hot/cold or such to be changed, they may even be already present.

In a lot of cases, these can be used and added without locking you out of migration since parts of these are deeper application level or just DB side. The query planner isn't the end-all of performance, there is plenty of differences between MySQL and PgSQL performance behaviour that might force you to switch even though the query planner won't drastically change things.




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