Honestly I haven't really experimented with anything else, I could easily switch to MariaDB (which is more or less a drip in replacement) or Postgres (since most of my projects use an ORM that can use MySQL or Postgres interchangeably). I know that MySQL works for me, after 10 years of using it I know how InnoDB works and how to optimize for it, I know which tools I need with MySQL (mostly tools from Percona)... So I don't really feel the need to start over with another DB.
I'll definitely use something like Mongo if I ever need to store non relational data, or Cassandra if I need to store data over many decentralized servers, and I indirectly use Elastic search for time series when I use graylog to store my logs. But it turns out most of the applications I build need a centralize datasource (with a few Replicas for availability) to store relational data, so MySQL it is !
MySQL (and Redis for cache and queues).
Honestly I haven't really experimented with anything else, I could easily switch to MariaDB (which is more or less a drip in replacement) or Postgres (since most of my projects use an ORM that can use MySQL or Postgres interchangeably). I know that MySQL works for me, after 10 years of using it I know how InnoDB works and how to optimize for it, I know which tools I need with MySQL (mostly tools from Percona)... So I don't really feel the need to start over with another DB.
I'll definitely use something like Mongo if I ever need to store non relational data, or Cassandra if I need to store data over many decentralized servers, and I indirectly use Elastic search for time series when I use graylog to store my logs. But it turns out most of the applications I build need a centralize datasource (with a few Replicas for availability) to store relational data, so MySQL it is !
great to know!