I'd disagree with your analogy. If your text editor crashes, it will cause a few minutes of lost work. If your database engine mangles your data, your site will be down for however long it takes you to restore from backups.
Looking over code would give you more than just an impression of its style; it would also give you a feel for the quality of the product. If most of the code you look at is of poor quality, it is very unlikely that the product, at a high level, will be any better.
> I'd disagree with your analogy. If your text editor crashes, it will cause a few minutes of lost work. If your database engine mangles your data, your site will be down for however long it takes you to restore from backups
So you are going to base the crashing of a database on the cursory non expert runtime of your eyes. Why not just test the database, read the doc, ask other experts.
Secondly rarely do most developers extend their database so their is very little need to know that codebase and they probably should not change that codebase (given the criticalness).
You know what developers extend often... their editors and IDEs. The code quality (in terms of readability) of that should be much higher.
Now obviously if you have nothing but the code to base (like no doc, no benchmarking, no existing mind share, etc...) and are generally knowledgeable in the area than yes code quality would be a good decision criteria but I remind you the OP said it was the major reason between Postgres and MySQL which are probably written by superior experts than the OP.
>So you are going to base the crashing of a database on the cursory non expert runtime of your eyes.
You look over the source code to decide whether the database is worth proceeding with. I would assume the OP did other research as well, even if code quality was the deciding factor.
And again, I don't find the text editor analogy a compelling argument.
If I view the source code to an operating system, and it looks like it was written by an amateur, I'm probably going to try to find a better option.
I would say his comment implied he went with Postgres. I generally think of MySQL, which, if memory serves, was started by people with little database knowledge, as not being as high quality as Postgres, which came directly out of another relational database project.
Looking over code would give you more than just an impression of its style; it would also give you a feel for the quality of the product. If most of the code you look at is of poor quality, it is very unlikely that the product, at a high level, will be any better.