MySQL Review

MySQL is a battle tested database that will be forever tied to the most popular blogging tool of all time - Wordpress.

Together, these technologies are estimated to power over 40% of all websites on the internet.

There is nothing wrong with using MySQL outside of the context of a Wordpress website. Many large, sophisticated organizations do just that! However, I find that most of the time I come across MySQL, it is powering a Wordpress site.

Pros

• It is free and open source.
• Developers love PostgreSQL, which makes it relatively easy to recruit for. It is consistently the most loved database technology on Stack Overflow's developer survey by a wide margin.
• Many other databases are compatible with MySQL. This means that if you outgrow MySQL at some point in the future, you will be able to adopt a different one (such as Aurora or even adopt a distributed solution like SingleStore) relatively easily.
• It is fast, safe, reliable, and has a vibrant community.
• It is readily available as a Docker image, through various package managers / official installers, or can be built from source.
• It has a decent official GUI manager called Workbench.

Another nice thing about using MySQL is that everyone offers it. Because of this, it's impossible to get "locked in" to a particular cloud vendor. You will always maintain leverage over your cloud provider that you could leave anytime you want. This is increasingly important as the large cloud providers gain more and more control over our digital infrastructure.

The generally open nature of the MySQL community just seems to permeate everything about the project. For example, there is an active community forum, an official Slack channel, and a Github repository.

Cons

MySQL doesn't have many cons, which is why I rate it so highly. However, there are a few.

• MySQL doesn't have columnstore indexes.
• SQL Server's 1st party tooling is just plain better. SSMS, SSIS, SQL Server Profiler, SSDT, SSRS, SSAS, and SQL Server Agent are all awesome.
• It doesn't have an extension ecosystem's like PostgreSQL's.
• The MySQL documentation is fine, but it is not a masterpiece of technical writing like the PostgreSQL documentation. Yes maybe I'm being dramatic. I don't care. @me.
• The PostGIS extension makes PostgreSQL much more popular than MySQL for geospatial use cases.