Like many starting out in websites and databases my first experience was with MySQL. I had no choice since the hosting service I used only offered MySQL. This is still the case for a lot of hosting - you get the standard LAMP stack and nothing more. I had read on the web that everyone is using MySQL, so how bad could it be? I was forgetting the maxim that quality and popularity are inversely proportional. BTW: it’s not really popularity in this case - it’s the most users - think Windoze.

Note to self: on Gentoo postgresql configuration files (pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf found in /var/lib/postgresql/data) need to be owned by the postgres user. So if you edit them as root, reset the owner:group before restarting postgresql.