&gt; why nearly every RDBMS post on Hacker News is about Postgres and almost never MySQL<p>You&#x27;ll see the same phenomenon on Slashdot.<p>MySQL is popular among a subset of programmers: web developers. In corporations, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are more popular. Further, MySQL is popular among a subset of web developers: those who use PHP. Among web developers who use Python, Postgres seems more popular.<p>My suspicion is that MySQL&#x27;s popularity is tied to those web-hosting plans (1 GB of storage! 1 TB of bandwidth! 10 databases! $10&#x2F;month!). They were almost always MySQL databases. Web hosts that offered Postgres databases were few and far between. This article corroborates my theory: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rodner.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-makes-mysql-so-popular.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rodner.blogspot.com&#x2F;2008&#x2F;01&#x2F;what-makes-mysql-so-popul...</a>. MySQL&#x27;s company (which at the time was &quot;MySQL&quot; not Oracle) pushed it in at a critical time in the development of the web.<p>I have written applications that use: Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL, and Oracle. My favorite by far is Postgres. The strangest thing to me is not that MySQL is more popular than Postgres, but that anyone uses Microsoft or Oracle at all. Not only do they cost a lot, but from a purely technical standpoint they are worse.