I’ve dabbled with MySQL and personally, I find it vastly inferior to better RDBMSs like Postgres; while I admit it’s come a long way and improved, even the latest version to my knowledge does not even support CHECK constraints to verify data integrity (it allows the keyword but doesn’t do anything with it).
As someone who is looking at switching away from Microsoft technologies and into open source, I am appalled by the sheer number of PHP-backed applications that will only work with MySQL as the underlying database. A number of these apps are really good and would save a lot of work in development, but the fact they haven’t been abstracted to be database agnostic is usually a deal-killer for me and my technical associates.
So I am curious – I understand why MySQL is so popular and why it’s almost always used with PHP, but why do so many PHP-backed sites refuse to be properly developed to allow for other databases, but instead force MySQL when there are much better and more ‘database-like’ options out there? I’m getting increasingly frustrated by these apps that I want to use, but they only work with MySQL and I won’t bring myself to use it because personally I find Postgres a much better database, and because I personally feel that your database should enforce it’s own constraints instead of doing this only at the code level.
I realize MySQL is popular, and it’s not a bad system, but I hate when I find a great application and it’ll only work when the database is MySQL because the developers used MySQL-specific modules and/or syntax.
Most PHP developers develop with PHP because it’s free, easy to get going, and powerful. All of the same qualities are shared with MySQL, so it’s a natural fit.
That being said, many professional developers create data-abstraction layers that would allow them easy integration with other backends. But most projects don’t need those types of things.