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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Maria database is free and open source. It uses MySQL format.

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

Postgis for images

CloudNative-pg for running DB clusters in kuberneties.

Absolutely depends on what do you want it for and what resources can you apply on it (learning, set-up, etc).

That said, MySQL is owned by Oracle. The more-or-less blessed alternative IIRC is MariaDB.

The only reason I wouldn’t go with Postgres is if I planned to do other things on the same machine. MariaDB/MySQL has been around forever. You may find something that requires it — Wordpress¹, for example, requires MariaDB (or MySQL but use MariaDB) and doesn’t support Postgres.

Also, there’s solutions like Docker containers if you are running multiple things on the same server. But if you’re just learning and putting one thing on a Raspberry Pi as a project or whatever, you don’t need to learn Docker yet.

¹ I’m not recommending Wordpress. It’s ancient and has security issues all the time. But over 40% of sites on the Net still use it in some form. (I mean Wordpress.org, the open source project. The Wordpress company seems to be having some “crazy CEO” drama at the moment.)

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.

Another vote for Postgres, MySQL kind of blows.

Hardly anyone ever says mysql is better. Postgres has a lot of nice features, But they’re still a hell of a lot more people out there with mySQL experience.

If for some reason you really want to go mysql I would urge you to look into percona and percona tools. It’s incredibly fast super optimized. The tools let you do backups that my sequel could only dream of.

That said, if you don’t have any strong needs for mySQL, and you don’t have any experience with it I would probably start picking up postgres.