MySQL or other RDBMS?

[nloding]

Not sure if this is the best place to ask or not.  Personally, I use MySQL -- Why?  I think mainly because it's what I was taught.  But I recently read this:

 

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showpost.php?p=498687&postcount=15

 

And found him pretty much trashing MySQL.  I'm still a newbie to RDBMS's -- why's he trashing MySQL?  What does PostgreSQL have over MySQL (or Oracle, or SQL Server, etc.)?  Except funnier names?

[hitman6003]

First off, that post is from 2002...MySQL, at that time, was still in version 4 (maybe even late version 3, I don't remember).  Since then it has made leaps and bounds.  It is a perfectly viable enterprise database, and usually the only thing that people have against it is misinformation and ignorance.

 

That is not to say it doesn't have weaknesses.  For example, SQL server has indexed views, MySQL does not.  On the other hand, why do you need an indexed view and how often are you really going to use it?  What MySQL lacks in *generally* seldom used features it more than makes up for in performance...especially on "low end" hardware.

 

The major gripe that most people have, and it's primarily administrators, is that mysql has spotty support for triggers.  Developers most commonly complain about the lack of a native XML data type support.

[nloding]

I've doing a lot of desktop application programming lately with C# (.NET 3.5) and SQL Server 2005 (soon to '08).  And I gotta say, I'm sick of SQL Server 2005.  I think it's AWFUL!  The functions to query and cycle through the results in C# are cumbersome and annoying compared to MySQL and PHP.

 

I was more curious because I'm gearing up for two enterprise scale web-apps that I was going to build on PHP/MySQL.  If it's viable now, I'm gonna run with it.  I was confused (again, RDBMS newbie here) because major sites are on top of MySQL.