Not too long ago (within the last couple of years, I think) Oracle acquired MySQL and there was, I know, a fair amount of concern within the open source community that Oracle wouldn’t support it very well–that they might even deliberately try to kill it or convert it into a profit making product. Perhaps these concerns have come true? Does anybody have a sense that the open source community is moving away from MySQL or whether Oracle has done a good job supporting this DBMS?
MySQL is still a powerful database. Postgres is More Free, but not in ways that we’re going to come up against this semester.
MySQL is easier to learn than Postgres and there are more resources geared towards beginners in general. Most of what you learn about using MySQL will translate seamlessly to Postgres, some things (user management, mostly) are very very different.
I think the kinds of things folks were worried about vis a vis the Oracle acquisition were MySQL’s ability to scale at very, very large volumes. Does it use resources efficiently at millions of rows?