Setting up a Ruby development environment on Windows is a wretched experience. It's no great surprise, then, that MySQL proliferated in a way that PostgreSQL didn't.īut things don't work that way any more. PostgreSQL's developers, on the other hand, didn't appear to prioritize any of these things, and while it wasn't impossible to run the database on Windows, doing so meant forfeiting the creature comforts that MySQL offered. It had an easy Windows installer, it had good Windows software for managing databases and writing queries, and it had good ODBC drivers. In spite of this, MySQL won considerable market- and mind-share because it was a much better development platform. While it is better today than it once was, MySQL has always been regarded as second-best when it comes to important considerations such as technical capabilities and data integrity, with PostgreSQL generally held to be the much better database. A prime example of this is the MySQL database server. This in turn had consequences for software, where solid Windows support could drive server-side usage. ![]() There simply wasn't any good alternative. This made Windows the development platform of choice by default. OS X was in its infancy, and only ran on weird, expensive, underpowered PowerPC hardware. Linux was already an important consideration for servers, but on the desktop was even less of a concern than it is today, reserved only for the most hardcore fans. ![]() Wind the clock back 15 years and Windows was the only serious platform for software developers. Supporting Linux apps in Windows is a significant move for a company that has spent decades promoting its own APIs and application platform, and it's unlikely that the company would make such a move just to provide a few creature comforts to developers. Microsoft deciding to support Linux software on Windows is a surprising move, and the obvious question is, why? Superficially, the answer is easy - developers like these tools, so supporting them makes developers happy - but the story runs a little deeper than that.
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