Uber’s Postgres Problems with Evan Klitzke

When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right?

Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog post about the migration, and post got very popular for at least three reasons:

1. Evan is a great writer and describes complicated distributed database concepts in simple terms
2. Uber is an interesting company with high quality engineers. When Uber takes on a task that will require lots of work–like changing its default relational database–people pay attention
3. MySQL vs. Postgres sounds like the type of divisive topic that is worth getting emotional about for the same reason that people get tribalistic about React vs. Angular, Kubernetes vs. Mesos, and so on

If you are even slightly interested in distributed systems or databases, I recommend reading Evan’s blog post in detail.