They’re so right about performance gotchas. I worked on a large Java project a few years back and they were transitioning from MySQL to Postgres, after the upgrade performance was abysmal. I then spent the next 5 months optimizing queries. A lot of the issues were inner joins and how MySQL and Postgres handled lookups in inner joins differently. I would still pick Postgres over MySQL because the tools and features around it are too very good.
Devil’s advocate: could it simply be that someone spent 5 months optimizing queries for MySQL before switching to Postgres? Such that Postgres performance isn’t “worse”, it just doesn’t plan queries in the same way that MySQL does.
It was definitely that. The queries were built to take advantage of MySQL features.I joined after they just switched and was told to optimize queries. Was a pretty toxic job, I was hired work on streaming media systems (like Hulu, ESPN, etc) but instead they had me doing query optimizations. I quit after 5 months. I was never able talk to my boss once, he avoided me and was always too busy.
