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Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB 320

Nerval's Lobster writes For the past ten years, developers and tech pros have made a game of comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL, with the latter seen by many as technically superior. Those who support PostgreSQL argue that its standards support and ACID compliance outweighs MySQL's speed. But MySQL remains popular thanks to its inclusion in every Linux Web hosting package, meaning that a mind-boggling number of Web developers have used it. In a new article, developer David Bolton compares MySQL/MariaDB 5.7.6 (released March 9, 2015) with PostgreSQL 9.4.1 and thinks the latter remains superior on several fronts, including subqueries, JSON support, and better licensing and data integrity: "I think MySQL has done a great job of improving itself to keep relevant, but I have to confess to favoring PostgreSQL."
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Why I Choose PostgreSQL Over MySQL/MariaDB

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:39PM (#49294239)

    Best of all worlds. And guess what, in the grand scheme of things, the price is a drop in the bucket compared to salaries.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:50PM (#49294325)

      MS SQL server has its place:

      1: Oftentimes a company already has it licensed, so might as well use it.

      2: It is auditor friendly, with the pieces of paper (FIPS, etc.) that don't mean much in real life, but do mean a lot when ISO, or other audits happen, and you have to justify your existence and design decisions. (For those who say certificates/certifications don't matter, one place I worked actually had auditors that would fire people on the spot for "failing to have authority to run the equipment" if their RHCE/MCSE/CCIE certs lapsed.)

      3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

      4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.

      This isn't to say that PostgreSQL is bad... but there are times where MS SQL is the ideal choice.

      • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:57PM (#49294369)

        In terms of licensing, I think the MS sales force is learning too much from Oracle. We are backing out from supporting MS-SQL due to the insanely expensive licensing terms for deployments that MS sales is starting to apply to it.

      • by Jhon ( 241832 )

        Plus installing LAMP is sounds cooler than installing LAPP.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Foofoobar ( 318279 )
        Yeah and it runs GREAT on Linux. Like a rock.
      • by neminem ( 561346 )

        More like for 100% of tasks. MSSQL is pretty good; a bit of a pain to install, and obviously crazy pricy unless you're just already paying for it for some other reason, but it's plenty powerful and pretty simple to use.

        Oracle, on the other hand, is a steaming pile of turd.

        • by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:20PM (#49294599)

          The Express Edition of MS SQL Server is pretty damn good for 99% of the deployments you would consider MySQL for, and its free. The limits are memory usage (1GB per instance), database size (10GB), CPU (1 physical or 4 cores) and instances (50 per server).

          That should run most websites and business apps fine. Because most websites and business apps are drastically overspecced and under used.

          • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:26PM (#49295261) Journal

            Translation: It has limits that renders it useless on production servers.

            • You can use that translation if you ignore my entire last paragraph...

              For fetching content for a CMS for a My Little Brony blog, its perfectly fine. Even in production.

              Hell, I do complex ETL on hundred million row datasets using SQL Server Express...

          • Those are the current limits. So do you build your business round the database that is free today and hope that: a) your business does not grow so that it needs more, and b) that MS does not reduce the limits and catch you. Either way you run the risk of ending up having to pay the license fees. Why not pick a database that will always be free - and keep that cash for something else ?

            • If your business grows, its trivial to migrate from Express to Standard - and I do mean trivial. In most circumstances you can just detach the DB files and reattach them to the Standard instance.

              And MS has yet to reduce the Express limits, infact they tend to expand them with each new version.

              A major issue with picking databases is whether they come with decent client libraries, so my decision making process rarely puts a significant amount of weight on whether something has no licensing cost or not. A much

        • More like for 100% of tasks.

          I tried invoking it on the Linux server that runs my back end and it couldn't even find it. It's worse than useless for that task.

          • by neminem ( 561346 )

            Ok, fine, you win. Oracle does technically work on Linux (for sufficiently gross values of "work"), so it does beat MSSQL in that regard. Still... while I certainly understand the existence of non-Microsoft ecosystems and that that could in some cases be the smart choice, I definitely can't understand going with a Linux setup and then choosing to use *Oracle*, for *anything*. Why would you possibly hate yourself that much?

            • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

              Oracle doesn't "merely work" on Linux, it's been Oracle's flagship platform for a number of years now. It took that title away from the darling of the commercial Unix world (Solaris Sparc).

              Oracle may have it's warts but at least it isn't pre-configured to eat itself. No wonder Windows admins are so used to rebooting machines so often.

              You would think that Microsoft would at least use a sane, sensible, and industry standard default.

            • Why said Oracle was an option being considered?

              I've used a few databases and they all suck with layers of excess complexity. BDB and related DBs are ok. They don't suffer interface bloat nearly as much. A Turing complete query language is completely stupid from a security standpoint.

              I'm moving to an in-memory database held in a running program with the client transaction atomicity enforced through the API and with a transaction log to disk from which the running state can be re-built.

              It used to be a problem

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Gr8Apes ( 679165 )

        MS SQL server has its place:

        Our competitors or enemies servers? A trashcan?

        1: Oftentimes a company already has it licensed, so might as well use it.

        Lemmings....

        2: It is auditor friendly, with the pieces of paper (FIPS, etc.) that don't mean much in real life, but do mean a lot when ISO, or other audits happen, and you have to justify your existence and design decisions. (For those who say certificates/certifications don't matter, one place I worked actually had auditors that would fire people on the spot for "failing to have authority to run the equipment" if their RHCE/MCSE/CCIE certs lapsed.)

        Sounds like a thankless place to work, but still doesn't support using MS SQL.

        3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

        citation? Finding people who have seen MS SQL is easy, finding expertise, however, is as much or more limited than for other systems, mainly because most with real expertise won't touch MS SQL except when the business end of a pointy stick is poking them in the eye.

        4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.

        This isn't to say that PostgreSQL is bad... but there are times where MS SQL is the ideal choice.

        MS SQL barely works, and falls over as soon as it is hit with significant load. It's an old massive pile of c

        • by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:47PM (#49294883) Journal

          Was the last version of SQL Server you used 7.0 or something. I love to dump on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but honestly SQL Sever 2000 on is pretty damn good. As far as falling over when hit with significant load, I was running a 60TB database on the first Itanium versions of SQL 2000 back in '04 and it never 'fell over'.

          The project was big enough and cost enough Microsoft was willing to send people out to help us tweak and tune. That is all we did though nothing exotic like a custom build or anything. Just end user tuneables and guidance on schema around partition views and like.

          So really there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of the Microsoft platform family but SQL Server falling over ain't one of them.

          • by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:33PM (#49295317) Journal

            There's this little matter of having to run Windows. Not very bloody useful, particularly on production servers, unless you want to a. buy a Windows Server license ($$$) and SQL Server licenses ($$$).

            Whereas I can install a Linux or BSD server, throw PostgreSQL or MySQL on it and the cost is the hardware and my time. If I need to add more infrastructure, again it's my cost and my time.

          • by Gr8Apes ( 679165 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:36PM (#49295351)
            I've had the misfortunate to work with 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2, and 2012, and every single one of them has failed spectacularly, many of them with the same basic issue, that wonderful escalating locks problem, which MS spins as a "performance improvement" much like driving a bus off a cliff improves its performance, and in much the same way.
            • by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @06:54PM (#49296385)

              I've had the misfortunate to work with 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008 R2, and 2012, and every single one of them has failed spectacularly, many of them with the same basic issue, that wonderful escalating locks problem, which MS spins as a "performance improvement" much like driving a bus off a cliff improves its performance, and in much the same way.

              If lock escalation is your problem then lock escalation isn't the problem.

          • by RoLi ( 141856 ) on Friday March 20, 2015 @04:08AM (#49299213)

            (un)paid advertizement:

            I love to dump on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but honestly SQL Sever 2000 on is pretty damn good.

            Now, if SQL server is "honestly" so good, why are the one million busiest sites slowly migrating away from Microsoft?

            http://news.netcraft.com/archi... [netcraft.com]

            In 2008, 20% of the million busiest websites used Microsoft, now only 12% do, and the decline slowly continues.

            When we talk about these installations, we talk about very heavy loads, very much data and very high requirements on reliability and availability.

            So why does the high-end "enterprise" systems move away from that "pretty damn good" platform? The Microsoft apologists on this thread constantly tell me who licensing costs don't matter and how good all Microsoft products are ("honestly"!) - but exactly in the one area where licensing costs really don't matter (the one million busiest sites) Microsoft is also losing it. So why then?

            Maybe it's not as "pretty damn good" as some anonymous internet commentators claim? Honestly?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jedidiah ( 1196 )

        > 3: Finding MS SQL expertise is easy.

        No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.

        > 4: MS SQL does work and is decently secure. For 99.99% of tasks, it is just as good as Oracle.

        I think Microsoft has the only RDBMS that ever had a genuine viral exploit in the wild

        • No. Not really. Microsoft pushes the idea that you don't need to have any clue to use it's products. It helps enable this idea with better novice interfaces. This leads to the problem that you end up with barely trained monkeys having the appearance that they can us Microsoft products.

          This is exactly why we recommend Microsoft SQL Server to customers. Barely trained monkeys is more realistic than expecting a trained DBA on staff.

          I think Microsoft has the only RDBMS that ever had a genuine viral exploit in the wild.

          So what is the relevance some dozen years later? By all measures SQL Server has had a good security record compared with competing products. Check public CVE data for each product and make an informed decision.

          Left a test Oracle server running overnight accidentally a number of years ago it had been owned by time I got in the next day...cherry picking is wor

    • Shhhhh, don't say that out loud! This is Slashdot after all - MS is the Devil!
      • by aralin ( 107264 )

        It is. We all here have 15 years of experience with Microsoft as the Devil and this makes it hard to ever trust them again. Because we did trust them and trust them again and again and again and every single freaking time, they've done something so horrible to break this trust that our very souls have felt like burning in hell.

    • Best of all worlds. And guess what, in the grand scheme of things, the price is a drop in the bucket compared to salaries.

      Alas, everyone has to pay salaries and then it's a question of how much you have left to get anything done. Nice try though.

    • by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @06:00PM (#49295781) Journal
      I don't know, in my experience, I rank it like this:

      1) Postgresql - full of random features that makes things easier and better (you can use almost any language for stored procedures, for example. Not huge, but nice).
      2) MS SQL - Works fine, not too interesting.
      3) MySQL - full of random feature that makes things harder (do you know you can't rollback a transaction that modifies a table? Every other database can....).
      4) Oracle - Has all the features, but some of them have very funky syntax.

      -- -- -- -- -- --

      If you support using the 'best tool for the job,' then the choice is obvious, following this algorithm:
      1) If you're using a Microsoft stack, use MsSQL (I've tried using entity framework with MySQL....it mostly works, but it's a pain).
      2) If you're using a stack that integrates well with MySQL, use MySQL.
      3) If you are in desperate need of corporate CYA, use Oracle.
      4) For anything else, use Postgresql. You won't regret it.
  • Duh (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:41PM (#49294257)

    Who trusts MySQL with important data? No one who knows about PG. Good web frameworks like Django prefer PG, while crap ones like Drupal and other PHPtards prefer MySQL.

    • Double duh. (tag story with "duh"). Try using a CTE to insert into a history table with the results of another table's delete in MySQL.

  • At least (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:42PM (#49294265)

    It's not Access

    • Better Access than an antiquated, undocumented rats' nest of VBA cruft in Excel.
      • Re:At least (Score:4, Funny)

        by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:45PM (#49295519)

        If Excel is using the old jet engine you get both in one deal.

        The worst stack I've ever seen. ASP invokes Access (via OLE automation) which in turn calls FORTRAN. I will smoke a turd in purgatory for showing them how to invoke Access.Application from VB.

        I quit in disgust shortly after. 'They' were supposed to define an API without knowing it, so we could replace the Access part. Management said: 'It's working, great lets move forward.'

  • by leonbloy ( 812294 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:45PM (#49294287)
    would be why I still choose to read Slashdot instead of ... anything else.

    Let me quote [slashdot.org], from the comments thread at a recent article by same submitter:

    Could we stop having Dice articles submitted by Nerval's Lobster? Why not fully disclose that the story was submitted by the corporate parent of Slashdot?

    Another user, in the same thread, had speculated [slashdot.org]:

    What comes next, a thread on "is Emacs better than Vi"?

    No, sir, you were utterly wrong. It came "Postgresql is better than Mysql".

    • Totally came to the thread for this. Was hoping to have someone rant that Postgre was for hipster rails developers, but comments are pretty early.

      This guy should really update his website [dhbolton.com] to say Postgre is superb

  • SQLite3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fyngyrz ( 762201 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:49PM (#49294315) Homepage Journal

    And for many tasks, you don't need any of that. Have a look at SQLite3 (also, it's built into Python, which can be handy.)

    Worried about stability? You can compile the SQLite3 source code right into your project. That way, your databases always match your shipping product, indefinitely, period.

    It's not usable for everything -- only a decent subset of SQL is supported -- but you might be surprised at just how much is there, and working well.

    • Re:SQLite3 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bacon Bits ( 926911 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:08PM (#49294467)

      SQLite3 is a fantastic product, but it's primarily intended as an embedded SQL database, not an RDBMS. They're not really intended to do the same things.

      On the other hand, at least SQLite doesn't "feature" silent non-deterministic aggregates [mysql.com].

  • Postgres hands down (Score:5, Informative)

    by infernalC ( 51228 ) <matthew.mellon@g o o g l e . com> on Thursday March 19, 2015 @03:50PM (#49294321) Homepage Journal

    I come from a Sybase SQL Anywhere shop. It never ceases to amaze me how stuff that can be elegantly expressed in a couple of queries in Watcom-SQL typically takes four times as much code in MySQL's dialect. I love Sybase's support for the ANSI standards, subqueries, Java/.NET/C/PHP/Perl stored procedures when they are the right tool for the job (ever needed to resize raster images in an INSERT trigger coming from some third-party application?), and great drivers. I shouldn't have to spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why MySQL doesn't support the standard casting string concatenation operator by default (||), or why subqueries don't work like they ought, etc.

    Having used Postgres, all of the worthwhile MySQL features are there, most of the SQLA features are there, and the pain level is much, much lower in Postgres than MySQL for someone coming from a full-featured commercial RDBMS.

    What really sucks is all of the applications that are so coded around MySQLisms that they don't run on ANSI-compliant engines.

    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      As someone who's used many, many DBMS engines MySQL is by far my least favorite. Even engines that are completely different from ANSI SQL like Intersystems Cache make more sense to me than the half standards compliant, half brokenness that is MySQL.

    • by MSG ( 12810 )

      What really sucks is all of the applications that are so coded around MySQLisms that they don't run on ANSI-compliant engines.

      Exactly. That is the primary reason I not only choose not to use MySQL, but actively advocate other SQL engines to other developers. Even where MySQL supports a standard syntax, their documentation tends to encourage their proprietary alternative syntax, making ports that much harder.

  • by i_ate_god ( 899684 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:01PM (#49294415)

    Isn't everyone all NoSQL nowadays or has that faded away?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      NoSQL only caught on with dumbasses. Everyone with a brain ignored it.

    • by ArcadeMan ( 2766669 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:10PM (#49294503)

      Nope, we all moved to XML.

    • They still use SQL, but only for things smaller then 'web scale'.

      Am I joking?

    • They still are using NoSQL... until they want to report and extract value from their data, then they'll migrate to an RDBMS.

      PostgreSQL is actually a pretty good NoSQL database [craigkerstiens.com] that you can also use as a kick-ass relational database.

      • by rycamor ( 194164 )

        I wouldn't even recommend bothering with hstore. There are several even better ways to use Postgres in a "NoSQL" setting.

        For example there is the Mongres [github.com] project, that lets a PostgreSQL database emulate the MongoDB protocol. So you could literally drop Postgres into a Mongo-powered application with not a single hiccup, and get a) better performance and b) all the back-end relational stuff you need when it comes time to do reporting or other business logic.

        There's also the new JSONB datatype in PostgreSQL 9.

    • by new_01 ( 4014887 )
      NoSQL has its use cases. But the fact that NoSQL lacked mature ACID compliance meant that many of the large companies who relied on certifying data integrity (think bank transactions and other large companies for which standard relational databases already provided them with safe transactions out of the box) couldn't switch over to it. "NewSQL" is the latest buzzword that is going around. They're finding that heavily modifying the database to fit into the distributed world is better than dropping SQL and AC
      • The point is not to switch over to NoSQL, but to use it where it has its benefits.

        90% of the data in our days does not need 'integrity constrains' or even transactions.

        RDBS are abused for everything because developers are to stupid to realize when a simple file is sufficient. Or their managers ... or what ever.

        Everytime I see someone 'logging' intoma database I like to carry him into the base,ent and chain him onto a wall.

  • Those who support PostgreSQL argue that its standards support and ACID compliance outweighs MySQL's speed.

    One expression I remember seeing on the topic went something like: "I can make it as fast as you want as long as it does not have to actually work". The conversation was about filesystems comparing (the non-complying) async-mode with the safer (but slower) alternatives, that actually stood by the promise of fsync(2).

    And another, more modern idea [tedneward.com] (only about 10 years old) quote is "Object/Relational Mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science". Which, for the purposes of TFA, may be interpreted as something like "who cares for ACID compliance — we can deal with occasional data-corruption and inconsistencies — just make it fast in the usual case".

    I rather doubt, we'll settle the question in this discussion...

  • I'm not quite sure about that but I though that not even MySQL's InnoDB allows you to alter your DB schema "under full throttle", whereas databases like PostgreSQL or Firebird shouldn't really have problems with that - transactions up to n see the old schema, transactions from n+1 onwards see the new one, and the RDBMS insulates you from all the nasty bookkeeping. I'm mentioning this as a post scriptum to the "Table Changes Without Locking" feature which is really 1980s stuff. (True, for Firebird, even tabl
  • The MOST important reason for using Postgres is that it has object ids (OIDs). This allows true referential integrity. You can have a row point at another row and this reference stays the same REGARDLESS of whether you change the primary key of the referenced row. This allows true object orientation.

    • by rycamor ( 194164 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:21PM (#49295207)

      That's not even close to what "referential integrity" means. In fact, it could be used to accomplish quite the opposite.

      OIDs are one feature of PostgreSQL that should be buried inside the implementation and not allowed to be accessed from the developer side. Otherwise you are pretty much completely going around the whole point of the Relational Model. If you are developing an application in such a way that it needs pointers to rows, you might as well just store data on the filesystem and be done with it. Or use one of those fancy NoSQL thingies and enjoy your data corruption.

  • In my experience (Score:5, Informative)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @04:33PM (#49294693) Homepage

    And I'm probably going to step on a lot of toes here, but people like me strongly prefer Postgres to MySQL. And by "people like me" I mean folks for whom their first real rdbms experience was theoretical or "commercial". I did both.

    I used ingres in college to a small extent and then the Ingres commercial product for years after that. I have also used Sybase and Oracle professionally. PostgreSQL easily walks among the giants of that industry.

    Every time this discussion comes up the MySQL side has to say "yeah, but..." about a thousand times. MySQL doesn't do ______ properly? "Yeah, but if you just install this other piece of software and change a couple of config files it *can* do it.' Well, con-fucking-gratulations!

    The point is that PostgreSQL does exactly what it should do out of the box. I don't have to change a configuration file to make it ACID compliant, fast, correct, whatever. It just works and works correctly out of the box.

    Every time someone tells me how easy MySQL is to set up they've betrayed their experience level in this realm.

    I know a lot of you are going to mod me down - I don't care. But why not reply instead?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Exactly! It's always blown my mind how much genuinely important functionality MySQL zealots are willing to do without in the name of simplicity. It really lets me know how little experience that have with genuinely mission-critical systems, or how small the environments they've worked in are.

      I absolutely think MySQL has its place, primarily as a support DB for web frameworks - but honestly that's mostly just because it's so firmly entrenched there that I long ago gave up trying to suggest that the develop

    • Makes sense to me. PostgreSQL is essentially the open source successor to Ingres (even down to being forked from the original Ingres codebase). In fact, PostgreSQL's name even means Post-ingres.
    • Ditto. PostgreSQL ha been sold for real money for a long long time. Developers who made a living off their applications used it and made a living. many of them.

      You dismiss it out of hand to your disadvantage.

  • We have a lot of XML publishing workflows. MySQL provides a -X commandline option which returns the results of a query in XML. I don't know if PostgreSQL, MSSQL, or Oracle have the equivalent (perhaps someone who knows can post). Right now, it's a pain-free way to get what we need in the form we want, with zero additional effort. If it exists in other rDBMSs, that makes our choices wider.
    • by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      Really? This is your show stopper. Any coder on here should be able to knock something like this out in their free time.

      There's probably already something along these lines on Sourceforge. Might even be platform neutral. That's fairly easy with something like Perl or Java.

      • Why shouldn't it be a show stopper. If XML is important, why shouldn't someone use a product that already delivers the goods, as opposed to one where the defense is "Well, just write something, or go look on Sourceforge and see if you get lucky!"

        • Why shouldn't it be a show stopper.

          Because your choice of database shouldn't be predicated on something that will take an afternoon of coding to fix.

  • Chances are, you don't know anything about databases. JetProfiler will show you the crappy queries you're using in an easy-to-understand way so you can fix your stuff and make everything faster.

    AFAIK, no such tool exists for Postgresql.

    As a bonus you don't have to deal with the annoying psql/pgsql crap, which for some reason drives me bonkers. I mean come on, make it psql or pgsql, not both. WTF?

  • Bottom line (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @05:19PM (#49295193) Homepage Journal

    In the beginning, Postgress set out with correctness as the primary goal. Whatever it did, it had to do it correctly. It started life on the slow and resource hungry side. MySQL set out to be fast and more or less correct in the common case. Back in the '90s that made a lot of sense for small servers.

    In the decades since, servers have gotten bigger and Postgress got fast and efficient while still being correct. Why would I want to incur a performance penalty in the surrounding software to check behind the database to make sure it didn't just scrag my data?

  • Come on - who really cares about MIT versus GPL licensing in this context? And by "who" I mean "people who manage and use databases as part of their paid job"?

    And why does anyone care what someone writing for Dice says on this topic? I read the article, and it doesn't sound like the author has even used any of the features he's decided favor postgres.

    What's next - a Dice article on emacs vs. vi?

  • by edibobb ( 113989 ) on Thursday March 19, 2015 @11:40PM (#49298303) Homepage
    Nervals Lobster's last 15 posts have been links to news.dice.com, the parent company of Slashdot. They're nothing but ads.
    [Add obligatory Slashdot's-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket slam here.]

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