Uber: Why we use MySQL

Uber infrastructure engineer Evan Klitzke has blogged this week about why the ride app maker switched from Postgres to MySQL. Typically, Postgres is seen as the hip and trendy RDBMS and an obvious choice over MySQL, but Klitzke says Postgres hit several brick walls:

Postgres served us well in the early days of Uber, but we ran into significant problems scaling Postgres with our growth. Today, we have some legacy Postgres instances, but the bulk of our databases are either built on top of MySQL (typically using our Schemaless layer) or, in some specialized cases, NoSQL databases like Cassandra. We are generally quite happy with MySQL.

Specifically, Uber staff found Postgres suffered from an "inefficient architecture for writes; inefficient data replication; issues with table corruption; poor replica MVCC support, difficulty upgrading to newer releases."

You can read the full breakdown here. ®