Why Not MySQL?

Deepak Jagannath wrote to us with a piece that talks about why a Web site shouldn't use MySQL for critical RDBMS. Do people agree or disagree?

Comments

Competing with pretty good products

[Smack]

Isn't part of the problem that Oracle, DB/2, Interbase, etc. actually work pretty good for people? By which I mean, if you have the money, there is NO reason to choose MySQL over them. This is not Apache vs. buggy bloated IIS or Linux vs. buggy bloated Win2000. This is like a Dodge Neon vs. a Miata. Most of the other open source products can say "we're cheap AND we're better". But not MySQL.

Another point is that an RDBMS is not like a webserver or an OS. You can't just tack extra feature onto the side of it to make it better/more competitive. Implementing something like rollbacks or transactions or subqueries (all important things lacking in MySQL) is going to touch every part of the code. And I don't think those kind of changes get done very well in a Bazaar environment.

Re:MySQL

[Jon Peterson]

Yes, there's a good reason for it -- virtually all IT managers are mindless sheep. It's the old "no one was ever fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Oracle" principle.

Bollocks.

You appear not to work in the very large e-commerce business. You assume that people that do are sheep because, well, _you_ can do your stuff fine with other products. You assume that because people do not buy the functionally best product they buy it because they are sheep.

I do not work designing very large e-commerce sites. I do work in a position where I see the RFPs and architecture requirements for these sites, and I have worked with most of the smaller products such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and so on.

Believe me, these tools are not even close to cutting it. Sure, many of those Oracle shops could (technically) use Sybase, MS-SQL, Informix and so on, but support contracts required for these sites are very demanding - engineers on site within hours, *CODE FIXED* within hours. Yes, Oracle will recompile Oracle and ship you a fixed binary within 24hours of a bug report - you just have to pay...

And yes, I am an IT manager, and yes I can write programs and put machines together, and yes I have installed Linux from floppies - does that make me not a sheep?

The 'no-one was ever fired for...' problem is alive and well, but it is not the explanation for every instance of a (oh horror) closed source commercial product dominating a nich market. Think about it.

Re:OK...anyone from Slashdot want to take this up?

[slim]

That's easy: if a Slashdot comment goes missing -- who gives a toss?

If a customer order goes missing -- well, it could be an important one, it could be money in the bank, lost.

Slashdot needs the speed, but not the performance; critical applications need the reliability, and are prepared to sacrifice performance. Easy.
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Re:No foreign keys

[King Babar]

Guess what? Neither does PostgreSQL (you can use triggers, but that's a pain). A bit of a PITA, but a well-written app can keep the integrity OK though.

This is true for PostgreSQL versions 6.5.x and below.

Postgresql 7.0 (which is now up to Beta 5, will have support for foreign keys, and more goodies.

Spot on...

[MosesJones]

I'm sure there is going to be a lot of slamming of the "mySQL is quick and it rocks on site X" variety. But the points raised are valid. There are certain things that are required for RDBMS to be worthy of the name. One such element is transactions, when maintaining critical data it is paramount to ensure that an adverse changes can be removed when the change is found to be invalid. There are others but in most of the systems I've worked in this has been the key requirement, to bunch up a load of calls which are interspursed with coding logic and at the point where you reach a magic if statement that determines that something has changed and now the request is invalid to remove all traces of that request.

"It isn't enough to be quick, you have to be accurate" as many a Western movie has pointed out. mySQL is a fine system for maintaining data that can be the right choices in certain instances. But don't go betting the company on it handling your business logic.

Yeah...

[Greyfox]

Everyone knows mysql isn't a real RDBMS and no one in his right mind would use it for a real web site. In fact, we don't really know if it would scale to a large web site capable of serving, say, 600,000 to 800,000 pages on a busy week day (Or less on weekends.) The only people we know who are actively using MySQL are little old ladies storing recipes.