Or you could, you know, learn multiple things, because very few companies that need scalability are best served by doing everything in only one technology. Or, for that matter, hiring people who only know one technology.

There's a hell of a lot of useful stuff to learn (practical and theoretical) from relational databases. NoSQL has some useful ideas too. However, advocating that someone wanting to be considered a "database administrator" only learn/focus on NoSQL - that's just poor advice.

Funny that you chose to reply to me instead of the parent. Learning just PostgreSQL is also poor advice.

Most DBAs will already know Oracle and MySQL and my point was that they would be much better advised learning a NoSQL database. Of course if you're a new DBA you should learn a relational database I just fail to see why on earth anybody would recommend PostgreSQL over Oracle/MySQL which are far, far, more popular.

"If I were looking to become a DBA today I wouldn't bother with PostgreSQL at all. I would learn all of the NoSQL databases because that is where all of the interest is right now."

That's what I was responding to. "looking to become a DBA" does not remotely imply someone who already "knows" Oracle and MySQL.

Oracle might be popular, but few places can afford, or justify paying for it. MySQL is mostly popular because everyone was busy cargo culting based on what Facebook and YouTube were doing instead of evaluating the choices on their merits. Luckily most of those people have moved on to cargo culting NoSQL choices.

If you want a solid open-source database, especially one that has a future, learn Postgres.

I love armchair experts.

So I guess if all of those clueless engineers at the world's most trafficked websites would have just listened to you they would never have picked MySQL. Have you ever thought of letting them know that they should switch over to PostgreSQL ?

The engineers and Facebook might have selected MySQL on merits. Or they might be stuck with trying to do the best with legacy choices. I don't know what the best solution is for them today, and it might not be either Postgres or MySQL.

If however you need to make a choice today for what database to use on a new project, then you should evaluate the choices instead of basing your decision on what might have been best for Facebook 8 years ago.

I'm not going to get into the technical differences here, because even if MySQL and Postgres were technically equivalent (and they aren't but I'll let you do your own research), I simply don't trust Oracle with the future of MySQL.

>I love armchair experts.

Speaking as a battle-scarred, proven old sage veteran of the DB wars? Because the opinions you state above don't really qualify you as that...

To be clear, I did not advocate learning only anything.

If you aren't interested in learning about MongoDB, MySQL, DB2, and stack of brittle punch cards, you're probably not cut out to be an IT professional in the first place.

dba and nosql? sounds strange. note that scalability is not everything.

It's strange a DBA managing a database ?

And you're right. Scalability isn't everything hence the popularity of NoSQL which are far more developer friendly than current SQL databases. And in most companies it is the development teams that dictate technology choices.