Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL

Why Uber Engineering Switched from Postgres to MySQL” is an interesting study with plenty of technical detail of how MySQL was a better choice than PostgreSQL for the very demanding growth of Uber.  These kinds of issues are probably way out of scope for any “regular Joe” application, but the insight into the differences of MySQL and PostgreSQL architectures is still useful.

Main PostgreSQL limitations covered by the study are:

  • Inefficient architecture for writes
  • Inefficient data replication
  • Issues with table corruption
  • Poor replica MVCC support
  • Difficulty upgrading to newer releases

forget-db – a simple GDPR inspired tool to anonymise confidential database data

forget-db:

A simple(ish) command line tool written in PHP 7.1 using Laravel Zero and Faker to help you anonymise/pseudonymise data within your database to support protecting either sensitive information, or peoples right to be forgotten with GDPR compliance.

The tool allows you to connect to either mysql, postgres, sqlite or sqlserver and replace defined information with random data to allow you to keep statistics/relationships/audit of actions etc.

It uses a simple yaml configuration file to define the conditions for overwriting, which fields you want to overwrite, and what to overwrite them with.