Why a Former MySQL Engineer Champions PostgreSQL Over Oracle and MariaDB

Reading: The author claims PostgreSQL is the best open‑source relational database.

When a developer leaves a job, the usual process involves paperwork and a small gift from HR, but some departing engineers use the occasion to voice strong technical opinions.

Steinar Gunderson, a former Oracle chief software engineer and member of the MySQL optimization tools team, wrote a blog after five years of working on MySQL, harshly criticizing the database.

Gunderson, also a co‑author of the SNAPY compression library and an IPv6 contributor, has since returned to Google, where he works on image and offline‑card search services and contributes to Chrome.

He repeatedly states that MySQL is a terrible database and strongly recommends switching to PostgreSQL. He describes MySQL's codebase as needing massive improvement and notes that even Oracle’s management supports a large‑scale refactor.

Although proud of MySQL 8.0 being better than 5.7, he admits the improvements are limited. He explains that recent changes aimed to bring MySQL’s optimization tools back to early‑2000s design standards, but that effort has reached its limit.

Oracle, to keep the product viable, upgraded the online analytical processing capabilities in Oracle Cloud, adding a memory‑analysis engine developed by the same team that builds Oracle Database.

MySQL originated in 1995 by David Axmark and Michael Widenius. The Swedish company MySQL AB was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which itself was bought by Oracle in 2009. After the acquisition, Widenius founded MariaDB, hiring a MySQL development team and offering its own MySQL‑compatible releases as a DBaaS.

Gunderson harshly warns against believing MariaDB is superior, arguing that its founders left due to dissatisfaction with the new technical environment rather than any superiority of their code.

He does not detail why PostgreSQL outperforms MySQL, but he does not consider it better than Oracle’s proprietary databases either.

Roland Hörmann, CEO of SIB Visions, spoke at Postgres Build 2021 about migrating from Oracle to PostgreSQL, emphasizing that PostgreSQL is open source, easy to configure, and requires minimal DBA involvement.

Oracle declined to comment on these statements.

On December 7 2021, Max Mether, co‑founder and VP of product management at MariaDB, responded that no database is perfect, noting the proliferation of models, storage engines, and protocols. He observed that MySQL lacks strong leadership and has faced large‑scale attacks, reinforcing his critical view.

Mether added that in 2016 MariaDB completely abandoned the original MySQL code, introducing new storage engines, dialects, monitoring tools, and even machine‑learning‑based workload analysis.