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IBM, MS Critique MySQL
magellan writes "InfoWorld has an article reporting how both IBM and Microsoft are dissing MySQL. While it is understandable from Microsoft, it is interesting that IBM, who often claims to be a defender of Open Source Software, would be so negative. Sun Microsystems and Yahoo are quoted as providing positive opinions on MySQL." On the credit site for MySQL, though, Bingo Foo writes "MySQL has finally answered its detractors who complained about its lack of transactions. A press release today reveals that InnoDB is now fully integrated with the stock MySQL product, allowing ACID-compliant transactions, rollback, and crash recovery. Let the religious wars begin!"
(P.S. Does MySQL have any support for checkpointing and hot backup, or do I have to take the whole database down during maintainance?)
Don't forget that IBM recently bought out Informix and now sells InformixSQL as well as DB2.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Open-source databases "don't support as many users, they don't support as much data, and you don't have as many connectivity options," said Jeff Jones, director of strategy for data management solutions at IBM. "They lack some key functionality and lack the scalability and performance, which keeps them out of the enterprise," Jones said.
No, it doesn't keep them out of enterprise. To manage some status data on some non-critical web server, out-of-the-box MySQL is perfectly adequate and much easier to use than fully-grown RDBMSs. Maybe it's a lot less scalable, but then it runs on the hardware you've already got.
But I can understand that it's quite frustrating for the big database vendors that some people do not care about online backup, transactions, stored procedures, views, replication etc. etc. and position even current stable MySQL versions against traditional RDBMSs. (Don't get me wrong, MySQL is fine if you don't need those features. You can already pick a subset of the features which are supported by MySQL in a single table type, and MySQL 5.0 will arrive one day and probably qualify as an RDBMS).
It would be nice if PostGres would support altering live tables (add/remove/modify columns), and stored procedures.
Have you checked out 7.3 for the column support? As for stored procedures, it has support for this also.
BWP
Can't speak for the world but our Quad Xeon 700, 4gb ram, 60gb DB works really well. Averages 300 queries per second.
We've recently ran into a problem when we hit ~420 connections. Plenty of ram but MySQL reports errno 11 (Resource unavailable) and new connections fail. This is with the MySQL-max binary release that is rated to 1,500 connections. It's bizarre, and low-level. But since we use replication, we just shifted some connections to the slave and all is good.
MySQL will last us just long enough to finish our Postgres migration.
Well.. Some databases don't lock rows or tables (unless necessary). MVCC is a superior option (Oracle / Postgresql for implementation references).
Anyway, there are a number of things that subselects can accomplish that joins cannot do as easily. Not the best example below, as it could be done in other ways and the formatting isn't so great, but anyway:
SELECT col1, max, othercol
FROM table
JOIN (SELECT max(col3) as max
, col1
FROM table3
GROUP BY col1) as ttab
USING (col1)
WHERE 2 = (select count(*)
from table2
WHERE table.col1 = table2.col1);
Rod Taylor
One of the things that jumped out at me at this article was that Jones's (IBM's) statement was very obviously a direct answer to very pointed, and very unpublished, question.
...then Jones response couldn't possibly be considered "bashing MySQL". He was just answering a question to the best of knowledge.
Jones did not wake up one morning and say to himself, "I'm going to call up InfoWorld and just rag on MySQL because I think its a threat to DB2!". No. InfoWorld called him, asked him a series of questions, kept what would make the best reading, and threw the rest away.
So, was Jones really being "negative" and "dissing" MySQL? We really don't know. If the questions he was answering were:
"What in your opinion is the main reason why MySQL is not beating DB2 and Oracle in the enterprise?"
and/or
"What would you consider MySQL's greatest flaws to be?"
Read the quote again to see my point:
Open-source databases "don't support as many users, they don't support as much data, and you don't have as many connectivity options," said Jeff Jones, director of strategy for data management solutions at IBM. "They lack some key functionality and lack the scalability and performance, which keeps them out of the enterprise," Jones said.
The whole article stinks of coaxing negative-sounding comments from people from "big bad companies", pasting them out of context, and calling it "Big Companies Once Again Stomp On Open Source!" Its also quite possible that he also said many wonderful things about MySQL, but that makes for boring reading and would be discarded.
It happens all the time, folx.
The
it is interesting that IBM, who often claims to be a defender of Open Source Software, would be so negative.
Perhaps the problem is that mysql, like, sucks?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.