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"Many" is not the same as a "substantial percentage",

and "building a business around a patent" is not the issue at al

All I'm saying is that many companies have taken this route and for very legitimate reasons - tax incentives and to aid in achieving funding. Many startup sotware companies need to gain the support of venture capital funds and / or early stage investors if they want to survive, and if patents help attract them, then thats what you do. If they enable you to pocket cash tax free too, all the better.

Of course, if software patents are enforceable, you're generally better off with such patents than without them. And you're right about the tax advantages, but even companies who take advantage of that are not necessarily in favour of software patents.

Software is a business, not a game. There are risks in every business of course, but a good patent search is a small investment to make if you are investing time and money in a project.

And if you're a closed source company, other companies can even patent the stuff you have done after your program is brought to market, since that doesn't count as a publication of the algorithm.

The point is simply that from a small business perspective, in the general case (I'm not claiming there aren't any exceptions) software patents pose much more risks than advantages.

I'm sure you know this and were just generalizing, but often times in horizontally scaled applications its the needless and dizzyingly large number of tcp/jdbc/etc. handshakes that kill the database host.

persistent database connections (pools) help alot here.

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/conne ction_pooling_with_connectorj.html

>I've never used mysql and I've avoided the flames about it not being a real database.... but come on. That is weak.

13.1.8. Subquery Syntax

HTH. HAND.

Considering that the M$ environment is under constant pressure from various threats I would like to call the selection of that environment risky, and almost stupid. By selecting other environments you would be running the risk of being more dependent on a few persons with that particular competence. On the other hand the number of persons competent enough to cause trouble will also decrease significantly.

If I was involved I would have selected OpenVMS , now owned by HP as operating system for the servers running either MySQL or Oracle as a database and developing the software in Ada or (horrendous thought) Pascal or maybe Java.

---
OpenVMS - The OS with longer uptimes than Microsoft support policies

I don't know if you are really aware of it, but note that the link you gave mentions the story behind the acronym SQL, which certainly used to be SEQUEL before and had to be changed for legal reasons, but doesn't mention the pronunciation of SQL at all. Actually it _is_ "Es Queue El": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL.

If you read the documentation of popular relational databases, it's quite possible that you find a paragraph regarding the pronunciation, and in that case you'll find they follow the ANSI convention. [1] [2]

I know when I started using RDBMs years ago I read about it, and ever since whenever I see someone pronouncing SQL as "sequel" the first thing that comes to my mind is "newbie". I suspect from now on one more thing will come to mind: a prick who wants to sound clever when he's actually an ignorant.

What is your point exactly? Gmail uses a few tables -- not a ridiculous number -- and they appear to not be using spacer images. (I can tell this by Firefox's Web Developer toolbar) While I like Google's technology, their markup has never impressed me.

These guys seem to have table-free sites figured out: MySQL, Wikipedia, Wired, ESPN..

Yeah, it's impossible to add extra database servers.

It's also unlikely that one could find a database server that can cache the results of identical queries when the data hasn't changed, significantly speeding up access to nearly-static data.

It's downright insane to consider using proper cache-control headers and a caching proxy in front of a web server farm.

It's sure too bad that these solutions can't be solved by merely hiring a competent sysadmin who's willing to relocate, 'cause that's be far too convenient. :)

It'd probably be easier to teach everyone in the company good HTML.

Yeah, it's impossible to add extra database servers.

It's also unlikely that one could find a database server that can cache the results of identical queries when the data hasn't changed, significantly speeding up access to nearly-static data.

It's downright insane to consider using proper cache-control headers and a caching proxy in front of a web server farm.

It's sure too bad that these solutions can't be solved by merely hiring a competent sysadmin who's willing to relocate, 'cause that's be far too convenient. :)

It'd probably be easier to teach everyone in the company good HTML.

From the page: Eventum is a user-friendly and flexible issue tracking system that can be used by a support department to track incoming technical support requests, or by a software development team to quickly organize tasks and bugs. Eventum is used by the MySQL AB Technical Support team, and has allowed us to dramatically improve our response times.

According to mysql they're are sites that run with 800 updates\inserts per second http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/innodb-overview. html.

Here is sql server performance test that gets over 9000 inserts per second.
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/jc_large_dat a_operations.asp

It took me two minutes to find these two exmamples. Now I didn't find an Oracle. But you do realize that 2000 inserts per second is not that many, OLTP database design is made for this.

From the MySQL cluster webpage:
"MySQL Cluster achieves its performance advantage by being a main memory clustered database solution, which keeps all data in memory"

We looked into highly scaleable DB solutions a few months back when building an app that needed thousands of transactions per second with a high write to read ratio. One of the other requirements was that we needed stored procedures.

After looking into nearly every available DB we found that only 2 met our requirements. Oracle and Ingres. After getting prices from Oracle the only option was Ingres. So far it has worked amazingly. Very fast and easy to scale. I'm actually quite surprised more people don't use Ingres.

> you are using My-SQL... something goes wrong...
what do you do?

Hmmm... does somebody want to point out to this guy that MySQL is, and has for a very long time, been funded by professional support?

MySQL was a bad example: http://www.mysql.com/network/support.html

> about the DB which is free as in speech and as in
> bear :) can you provide name/link?

I'm not interested in starting YAFDF (Yet Another FOSS Database Flamewar) here, so I'll post links to my favourite and its chief competitor. Both have their proponents. Both are Open Source products.

"The World's Most Popular Open Source Database"

"The World's Most Advanced Open Source Database"

I know which one I use, but what matters is which works best for you.

Yes, it's called the LGPL. There are very few programs designed to be linked as a library that are released under the regular GPL. A notable exception is the mysql libraries.

However, the GPL depends upon copyright law. In my opinion, it would be difficult to prove that a program is a derivative work if it is only dynamically linked. In other words, since it does not modify the original binary in any way and isn't represented as a monolithic piece of software, is it really a derivative work? Does someone who makes a frame designed to perfectly complement a painting violate the copyright of the artist? As far as I know, the precise boundary of a derivative work of software has not yet been tested in court.

I think this problem is a DATABASE problem. If the query is common enough, try caching it in memory on the database server. Something like the mysql query cache is your friend, not hundreds of lines of code!

Building a hardware system that includes MySQL and selling that hardware system to customers for installation at their own locations. [Source]

My read of MySQL's license seems to say that you need to purchase a MySQL Commercial License because you are using an application that uses MySQL in a commercial setting and not releasing the source to that application.

I've screwed up my DBs many times with my own stupid mistakes, and the backup and binary log have always come to the rescue and worked far faster than I expected. In general, if you loose one transaction and can't fix the table yourself, I'd say you should ask the expert in your environment for some help, or at least admit to your own shortcomings to your management.

The GPL is not viral.

Well, why do you think, viral doesn't describe the paragraph 2.b) of the GPL adequately?

2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

I don't question the way, GPL violations are handled at court today. But the GPL demands rights on your code which is problematic and made many open source projects either dual licensed (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org) or tagged with an exception (MySQL).

If you don't mind releasing source and contributing changes/improvements back to the community, you can use the code for free. But, if you want to create a closed-source/proprietary project, you can buy a license that allows it. MySQL does this.

The GPL does not create an anti-business environment in and of itself. It merely a licensing option that can be part of a portfolio of licensing options developers make available to those who want to use their code.

- Greg

> Bitkeeper loses only customer

Perhaps not the only one.

1) No need to pay. Up to you to decide whether you want support or not.

2)(a) If it's FLOSS no license needed. Though you or your customers might want one anyway, for the support or the Certified Partner package or marketing things. Up to you and them.

2)(b) if it's not FLOSS, see section C7 of the partner FAQ and the Certified Technology Partner program you'll find it's not too painful. At least, I hope that $595 isn't too painful for any ongoing business - you'd be bankrupt if it was!:)

1) No need to pay. Up to you to decide whether you want support or not.

2)(a) If it's FLOSS no license needed. Though you or your customers might want one anyway, for the support or the Certified Partner package or marketing things. Up to you and them.

2)(b) if it's not FLOSS, see section C7 of the partner FAQ and the Certified Technology Partner program you'll find it's not too painful. At least, I hope that $595 isn't too painful for any ongoing business - you'd be bankrupt if it was!:)

The above is absolute rubbish, you do not need to GPL your code if you interact with MySQL, they even explicitly make this clear on their site.

The MySQL licensing works as follows: if you distribute MySQL with your commercial product or install it for the client as part of the overall solution you provide to the client, then you need to pay the commercial license fee (you do NOT need to GPL your own product or anything like that). If you distribute just your own software to the client and merely tell the client to install MySQL themselves, then you do not need to pay the commercial license fee.

The OpenSource MySQL license ONLY applies IF you are already developing OpenSource.

See http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/ for more info.

The book chapter you quoted from isn't current, though it's still very useful as an overview. Recent versions handle this, both logging consistently and rolling back consistently, including to replicating slaves. See the manual section on the binary log.

We know that MySQL records queries in the binary log after it executes them. We also know that MySQL writes transactions to the binary log after they have been committed. What happens if MySQL crashes, or someone pulls the plug in the microseconds after a transaction has been committed but before it writes the transaction to the binary log?

The result is that the master will contain the results of having completed the transaction, but the slaves will never see it. Ever. The transaction may have been a simple insert, or it could have been something as dramatic as a DROP TABLE command.

There is currently no workaround for this problem. Luckily MySQL crashes are rare. Make sure the power cables are plugged in tightly!

> Where do I apply? :-)

Here's a good place to start.

Don't you mean, "can't create a fulltext index on anything BUT MyISAM tables"?

In any case, since the source is available, there's nothing preventing anyone from adding this capability to InnoDB, or adding FK and transaction support to MyISAM.

In fact MySQL is specifically architected to allow different storage engines to be used with the server. (This is how MySQL Cluster has been implemented, for example.) Here's an article talks about how to go about writing your own storage engine. It's not as hard as you might think.

Or you can just wait for MySQL 5.1. :)

Don't you mean, "can't create a fulltext index on anything BUT MyISAM tables"?

In any case, since the source is available, there's nothing preventing anyone from adding this capability to InnoDB, or adding FK and transaction support to MyISAM.

In fact MySQL is specifically architected to allow different storage engines to be used with the server. (This is how MySQL Cluster has been implemented, for example.) Here's an article talks about how to go about writing your own storage engine. It's not as hard as you might think.

Or you can just wait for MySQL 5.1. :)

Yeah, especially not something with millions of queries in a large cluster environment.
Sabre has been using mySQL to power their GDS backend, which also includes Travelocity, for several years now.

> They just don't exist in the same space together.

1. the op claim *fastest* wasn't limited to any particular "space"

2. mysql is pretty cheap as far as commercial databases go, at $600 / database server. But both oracle and db2 have versions within this price range. For example, DB2 Express is somewhere between $500 & $1500, and is limited to 2 cpus. On the other hand, it includes partitioning (MDC), parallelism, a mature optimizer, standard features, etc. It can handle 5000 transactions / second - in a standard database environment in which you've got referential, check, and unique constraints on your data.

So, yeah, mysql far slower than db2 & oracle at the top end, where it doesn't really compete. But it's also generally slower at the low end as well - where its only edge is simpler installation. Ah, and a GPL version that almost no corporate clients qualify for. And perhaps almost nobody else either. Who can tell?
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comme rcial-license.html

InnoDB provides MySQL with a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) storage engine with commit, rollback, and crash recovery capabilities. InnoDB does locking on the row level and also provides an Oracle-style consistent non-locking read in SELECT statements. These features increase multi-user concurrency and performance. There is no need for lock escalation in InnoDB because row-level locks in InnoDB fit in very little space. InnoDB also supports FOREIGN KEY constraints. In SQL queries you can freely mix InnoDB type tables with other table types of MySQL, even within the same query.

"stored procedures, triggers and views,"

No, it isn't unethical. The main focus of MySQL has always been speed. MySQL is MUCH faster than PostgreSQL. If speed is an issue, then MySQL is the proper database to use (and MySQL has supported transactions since 4.0 see here). PostgreSQL is fine for a small to medium site or business, but for a mainstream site, it will not keep up.

My favourite quote from the MySQL manual is from the page on foreign key constraints.

Starting from MySQL 3.23.50, InnoDB allows you to add a new foreign key constraint to a table by using ALTER TABLE [...] Starting from MySQL 4.0.13, InnoDB supports the use of ALTER TABLE to drop foreign keys.

Prior to 4.0.13 the official way to drop a foreign key was to drop the table and recreate it from scratch (!). Of course, you can't actually drop the table without disabling foreign keys, and that feature was first supported in 3.23.52.

It's funny looking back on it, but it wasn't when I lost weeks of my life and most of my hair with 3.23.51.

The correct handling of NOT NULL is fixed (or at least fixable) in 5.0.3

Just start mysql with : mysqld --sql-mode="STRICT_ALL_TABLES" and it will error if you try to skip a NOT NULL column on insertion.

* Easy replication on MySQL/ Not so easy on PostgreSQL

Go ahead and click on any of the links on that page which describe bugs fixed in a release of the many branches. In almost every one, there's a critical bug that causes replication to fail, turn itself off, crash mysql, or otherwise act in an unpredictable manner. We've wanted to use it for two years now, but every release has some terrible flaw that makes this impossible.

Heck, they've only recently fixed a bug in the 4.0 branch that's been there since at least 4.0.12 which caused mysql to silently segfault and restart itself. Not to mention the bug before that, which segfaulted, restarted mysql, and randomly corrupted open tables. 4.0 is just now getting to the point where I'd recommend it to other people. I won't touch 5.0 with a mile-long pole until it hits 5.0.20.

Yes. The license does really suck for companies. Our company is stuck at 4.0.18 as well because after that point, they switched from GPL to their own license. http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comme rcial-license.html It's not very condusive to using mySQL on a sold appliance/product because mySQL wants > $600 per license!!! https://shop.mysql.com/ Hurry up and save 0%. offer ends March 31st. LOL!

Yes. The license does really suck for companies. Our company is stuck at 4.0.18 as well because after that point, they switched from GPL to their own license. http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/comme rcial-license.html It's not very condusive to using mySQL on a sold appliance/product because mySQL wants > $600 per license!!! https://shop.mysql.com/ Hurry up and save 0%. offer ends March 31st. LOL!

"No database professional would touch a product that doesn't support those with a ten foot pole"

Thats a pretty harsh comment.I think MySQL is useful in a lot of situations.Heck it's even used by Yahoo
Yahoo surely employs "database professionals" ?

DELETE FROM t1
WHERE id IN (SELECT MIN(id) FROM t1)

DELETE FROM t1
WHERE id IN (SELECT MIN(id) FROM t1)

Okay, let's see...

Livejournal runs on mySQL (with memcached), and has had 970k users update their LJs in the past week. Assume that on average, each journal gets 10 views in that one week (it's probably higher, as there are some really large communities). That's 9.7 million page views in a week, or ~ 40 million a month. Plus the people who just browse and don't have an account.

Slashdot itself uses mySQL..I have no clue about the pageviews, though I know it's in the millions a month.

Google is a mySQL customer. As is Dow Jones, the people that publish the Wall Street Journal and its online editions. So is the NYSE, NASA, the US Census Bureau, everyone's beloved AOL, the Associated Press, Texas Instruments, among plenty others.

Just because mySQL doesn't work for your project doesn't mean it doesn't for others. Not to mention that it's free and ships with almost every major Linux distro out there.

Okay, let's see...

Livejournal runs on mySQL (with memcached), and has had 970k users update their LJs in the past week. Assume that on average, each journal gets 10 views in that one week (it's probably higher, as there are some really large communities). That's 9.7 million page views in a week, or ~ 40 million a month. Plus the people who just browse and don't have an account.

Slashdot itself uses mySQL..I have no clue about the pageviews, though I know it's in the millions a month.

Google is a mySQL customer. As is Dow Jones, the people that publish the Wall Street Journal and its online editions. So is the NYSE, NASA, the US Census Bureau, everyone's beloved AOL, the Associated Press, Texas Instruments, among plenty others.

Just because mySQL doesn't work for your project doesn't mean it doesn't for others. Not to mention that it's free and ships with almost every major Linux distro out there.

Okay, let's see...

Livejournal runs on mySQL (with memcached), and has had 970k users update their LJs in the past week. Assume that on average, each journal gets 10 views in that one week (it's probably higher, as there are some really large communities). That's 9.7 million page views in a week, or ~ 40 million a month. Plus the people who just browse and don't have an account.

Slashdot itself uses mySQL..I have no clue about the pageviews, though I know it's in the millions a month.

Google is a mySQL customer. As is Dow Jones, the people that publish the Wall Street Journal and its online editions. So is the NYSE, NASA, the US Census Bureau, everyone's beloved AOL, the Associated Press, Texas Instruments, among plenty others.

Just because mySQL doesn't work for your project doesn't mean it doesn't for others. Not to mention that it's free and ships with almost every major Linux distro out there.

Okay, let's see...

Livejournal runs on mySQL (with memcached), and has had 970k users update their LJs in the past week. Assume that on average, each journal gets 10 views in that one week (it's probably higher, as there are some really large communities). That's 9.7 million page views in a week, or ~ 40 million a month. Plus the people who just browse and don't have an account.

Slashdot itself uses mySQL..I have no clue about the pageviews, though I know it's in the millions a month.

Google is a mySQL customer. As is Dow Jones, the people that publish the Wall Street Journal and its online editions. So is the NYSE, NASA, the US Census Bureau, everyone's beloved AOL, the Associated Press, Texas Instruments, among plenty others.

Just because mySQL doesn't work for your project doesn't mean it doesn't for others. Not to mention that it's free and ships with almost every major Linux distro out there.

it says on the 5.0.3 change log that its beta. http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/news-5-0-3.html

Plus 500 EUR per server.

https://shop.mysql.com/?sub=ac&pd_no=68

Unless, of course, your project is GPL, in which case you can use it for free, but ever since MySQL bought the JDBC and ODBC driver rights and changed their license from LGPL to GPL to make more money, non-GPL projects are better off using PostgreSQL which has no small corporate backer eternally on the lookout for the quick buck.

This blurb on Slashdot is an advertorial. There's absolutely no real meat to the ZDNet article. It's got one quote from a guy at mySQL mentioning three new features. The older slashdot story pointing to the changelog at mySQL has way more information than this ZDnet piece. And it doesn't conveniently feature a big banner ad for SUN hardware.

It was submitted from an anonymous reader. I am betting that anonymous reader is a sales guy at ZDnet looking to boost hit reports for their Sun banner ads. "I'll call those dorks at slashdot and pay them to link to a little pseudo story about mySQL."