Postgres. It’s more strict by default, which leads to a lot fewer surprises.

Here’s my rule of thumb:

1. SQLite - if it’s enough
2. Postgres
3. MariaDB - if you don’t care about your data and just want the thing to work
4. MySQL - if you sold your soul to Oracle, but still can’t afford their license fee
5. Something else - you’re a hipster or have very unique requirements

Postgres, hands down. It’s far better than MySQL in every way.

I have historically gone with PostgreSQL and had no complaints. The licensing issues concerning MySQL also give one pause (Oracle are greedy bastards who will use any excuse to extract money from captive customers, so depending on their properties is to be avoided). Having said that, these days, SQLite is probably sufficient for many workloads and has the advantage of not requiring a database server.

Postgres is far superior in every way.

We used MySQL (and Percona XtraDB) servers at work, and it is so bad. So I made several presentations showing generic and specific reasons why Postgres is better. I had to cut a lot of content because MySQL is just that bad.

Some things may not seem relevant now, but as you keep the DB around long enough, you will appreciate the whole package of Postgres.

Things that will help a lot, but are extensions:

• pg_partman - for automatic partition management
• patroni - management of replicas, automatic failover - it does everything for you with simple commands

There is a DB comparison matrix, but hasn’t been updated in over a year, which is a shame, but still gives you the idea of how different databases support SQL features: link.

Spoiler: postgres has the most support, with a huge lead

Edit: MySQL is dead last, btw

As someone that admins hundreds of MySQL at work, I’d go with PostgreSQL.

You aren’t exposing the database right?

As somebody who just watched a team implement MySQL for an app that only supported Postgres, I’d go with Postgres.

I never want to use MySQL again. Postgres or SQLite for relational databases.

Postgres is a more robust and better designed and developed product, also it’s not owned by fucking Oracle.

Postgres, the extensions and open source community have been very helpful.

Postgis for images

CloudNative-pg for running DB clusters in kuberneties.

PostgreSQL is just better. It’s supports transactions on DDL (things like altering table structure) and enforces unique constraints after transactions complete … so you can actually do a bunch of important stuff (like update your table structure or swap unique values between rows) safely.

Another vote for Postgres, MySQL kind of blows.

Postgres also had the advantage of great support for JSON elements, which gives you the power of a no-sql system like mongo in the package. A major selling point if your schema is evolving.

We have both MySQL and PostgreSQL in our production environment. Postgres is way nicer as a user of the DB. I created a document months ago outlining a dozen different things that Postgres does that MySQL either doesn’t do or does worse. I can’t speak to managing the DB as I don’t have experience with that.

Choosing is not so much about whether it’s internet facing or not. From the programmer’s perspective and an administrator’s perspective there are pros and cons to both. As someone looking to self-host, if you want to run a service that works with either, I would make the choice based on what seems the most supported, or which one you feel the most comfortable looking up and performing administrative tasks on. I tend to use postgresql more just because I have more experience with it and can recommend it if that’s what you need, but mysql can be just as good or better in many circumstances. Pick whichever one looks easier to you.

PostgreSQL is the more feature rich, but if you don’t care about all those features like saving and searching in json structures, Geo data structures and a to of other stuff because you have a simple APO then MySQL is good enough, maybe even SQLite.