foreword
The only way to have a friend is to be one. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
This may seem like an unusual foreword for me to write, especially considering my reputation as a member of the Spring team. Spring is an application development framework utilized by millions to create robust systems and services on the Java Virtual Machine. Although I appreciate the nuances of Postgres, I am an application developer, not a database administrator or database engineer who would typically be invited to write a foreword for a database-related book. But this book is written by a developer for developers.
I fell in love with Postgres long ago because of all the amazing tools (and, let’s be honest, awe-inspiring toys) it offered me as an application developer and programmer. I loved it from very early on, but sometimes it felt like I was alone.
Today, Postgres is a de facto standard in the industry. As the saying should go, “Nobody ever got fired for deploying Postgres.” But let me tell you, being a Postgres enthusiast hasn’t always been easy.
I began my professional journey as a software engineer in 2002, a time when MySQL roamed the earth. It was MySQL, not Postgres, that was the go-to database of choice. MySQL was the emerging standard. It was the M in the LAMP Stack, after all! Its popularity was undeniable.
And as appealing as Postgres was for me, an application developer, application developers aren’t the only ones who get to choose a database. There were several reasons MySQL was in vogue: