Andrew Atkinson: Rails + Postgres Postgres.FM 086 — Extended blog post edition! 🎙️

I recently joined Michael and Nikolay as a guest on a favorite podcast of mine, postgres.fm, which has been a favorite going back to when it started in August 2022. Why’s that? Why I like the postgres.fm podcast As a weekly-release podcast covering PostgreSQL for nearly 100 episodes, Michael and Nikolay have covered a lot of ground! All of the episodes have great content, covering a nice level of depth, in a short amount of time. Each host brings their unique perspective. The launch of the podcast overlapped with writing my PostgreSQL book. Most Friday mornings of episode releases, I’d hop onto my treadmill and listen. I’d usually have follow-up ideas and notes from each episode. The weekly release cadence helped me stay motivated while writing, and the coverage helped broaden my perspectives. I’m really thankful to Michael and Nikolay for creating the podcast, and releasing episodes each week. I know it’s been a lot of work for them, and it’s been quite generous of them to share their knowledge with the community. Now, on with the Rails + Postgres episode! Is Postgres a popular choice for Rails? This was the first question from Michael. It’s difficult to answer with confidence, especially since I’m in sort of a bubble of PostgreSQL fans. Subjectively, PostgreSQL feels like the most popular relational database choice for new Rails apps. To add a little objectivity, we did bring in the Planet Argon survey with results from more than 2600 respondents from 2022. The 2022 Ruby on Rails Community Survey from Planet Argon1 responses show that PostgreSQL took over in 2014 from MySQL, as the top choice of being “typically used” as the relational database, and has continued to stay there. What about MySQL and others? As far as other open source relational databases, MySQL or MariaDB are popular for Ruby on Rails apps today, and have been since Rails started in the 2000s. Companies like Shopify, GitHub, Airbnb that famously adopted Ruby on Rails in the 2000s and contin[...]