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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!"
So far, I still see MySQL and some of the other open-source databases as really niche players," said Sheryl Tullis, product manager for the SQL Server database at Microsoft.
"With open-source, you're not going to get a platform that's as reliable or scalable or as secure as what you're going to get with a leading vendor," Tullis said.
One of my old profs used to say, "consider the source."
This is obvious microsoft bullshit, as open-source platforms are more reliable, and more scalable than anything from microsoft.
What's interesting is that IBM now sees open source as a double-edged sword.
Let the fud wars begin!
Why is this disturbing? The fact is, MySQL is a sub-par database. It lacks many of the features of commercial databases, and is blown away by many free ones such as PostgreSQL. Just because IBM and Sun support open source doesn't mean they're going to support BAD PRODUCTS. Let's use a little common sense here.
Is your browser retarded?
IBM and Sun are *not* open source allies. This is not a war you retard it's business. They will only support open source and free software when it is profitable for them to do so. IBM sells a commercial database and has no interest in MySQL.
IBM and Sun are supposed to be open source allies
They are not allies they are businesses and as such are responsible to the stock holders. They are in business to make money. IBM has been cozying up to some Open Source projects as a way to bolster its other offerings and to more effectively compete with MS and their other competitors.
IBM sells DB2, while MySQL does intersect a subset of the potential customer database needs, so they are naturally critical. Nothing amazing here.
Anybody who has built very large, mission-critical database systems would never think of using MySQL. MySQL is great for small, simple applications, and has been very popular for web content site because of it's quick speed or reading data, but it's lack of truly robust transaction support (until recently with the 4.x release) scares big corporate DBAs. Not to mention its lack of stored procedures, sub-queries, and many other SQL programming features and strong 3rd-party management tools make it a 2nd-tier RDBMS in my mind. But I don't mind using it for web content or for simple apps that I want to run on Linux or a low-cost ISP network that includes MySQL support.
Use it for what it's good for. If other products are better at doing other things, get over it.
Microsoft's bashing is pretty obvious. And IBM's is somewhat surprising as well, though they may use some open source RDBMS as part of their Linux product lines and push DB/2 for larger products, just ive they do with AIX vs. Linux.
Even RedHat pushes PostgreSQL over MySQL as their RDBMS product of choice. MySQL can't even get props for best RDBMS among the open-source world, though it's the most popular.
No, no, see, I deliberately avoided comparing two similar things, because I don't want to get into a conversation about whether MySQL is better or worse than DB2. That conversation is so fucking loaded. For instance, if you need to whip up a really quick database on your personal time to do something simple, MySQL's simplicity beats DB2's robustness hands down. So that whole conversation is pointless.
That's why I compared a car to a plane. They're both transportation machines (i.e., databases), but they're designed to do radically different jobs. They're just not comparable.
Big companies tend to choose support, small companies prefer to save some money and have some database expertise in-house. But for many companies, it's a tough call.
Too slow? Check TCP-C all the fastest entries are running MSSQL now granted these are share nothing clusters which isnt very realistic for the real world but slow is no longer one of MS's shortcomings. Reliability, true scalability, and a few other things I would fault them for but not speed. Actually it kind of sounds kind of like MySQL =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Or perhaps look to incororate it into their own offerings in the same manner as they have done with Linux
Either way, in the corporate world where support contracts == good product / peace of mind MySQL will still struggle without any BIG corporate sponsorship. We're a big IBM shop and we're struggling to get Linux in here for that very reason. Even though Red Hat and IBM support Linux and each other, it's not enough. MySQL will likely face similar obstacles.
Don't get me wrong, times are a changin', however slowly. But at this point, I think perception (of support) is the biggest problem OSS faces in the corporate world.
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Anyone realize this?
Lotsa boosterism in the story titles themselves, but there's never, ever, ever been a Slashdot story about MySQL where 3/4ths of the population didn't basically say:
MySQL may be fast, but it's underfeatured. Postgres does rule, though!
I don't get it. Does anyone but the people doing the writeups actually think MySQL is meant for large scale terabyte databases?
One core law of computer science is that the best solution to a small problem is never the best solution to much larger problems. Actually, the physical world works in much the same way -- a human sized insect would collapse quite quickly.
It's not the law that's surprising, it's that everyone keeps repeating it as if anyone else believed otherwise...
--Dan
On a side note: What i find curious is why it's logical for MS to critisize and not for DB2, I'm currently involved at both the impelmentation of DB2 v 7 on OS/390 and the implementation of SQL2000 on Win2K and to be honest MS wins. It's note as stable as DB2 because the OS isn't and it can't handle nearly as many transactions but things like BLOBS (Binarie Large Objects) don't fully work in DB2 v7 (it crashes when running multiple BLOB selects) and MS has this piece of tech fully functional.
Views are also one of the worst pigs ever created
How does that bear out, exactly? My concept of a view is a pre-compiled sql statement that can have permissions defined independantly of the underlying tables and which may or may not be updatable. The benefits are:
1 pre-compilation: yippee.
2. modularization: ya only gotta write it once
3. permissions: Why give permissions on your base tables to those pesky users?
4. updatable views: kinda follows from 3, IMHO
So, what are the downsides? Cites? Examples? Hard numbers?
meh.
While people can argue the technical merits of each database app till the end of time, first, a lot is dependant on individual situations. One server we run FoodPlaces Restaurant Guide has a far larger database set than our XXX Binary Image Newsgroup (USENET) Server. The hardware is slightly in favor of BinFeeds, but we have lotsa problems with table errors and such, even though currently the FoodPlaces tables are far larger and far more complex.
The reason quite simply seems to be the way MySQL handles threads, concurrent operations, locking and errors. FoodPlaces is primarily database read queries with no updates, inserts or such, while BinFeeds uses tons of update, insert and fetches. MySQL bombs horribly in such a situation.
Point is, I can post tons of numbers showing the amazing power of MySQL based off the limited updates and inserts on FoodPlaces and the high traffic of the site, or I can post logs of table crashes that sometimes exceed 2 an hour for BinFeeds, with only adequate performance.
It may be interesting to see TRUE real world results that show how MySQL handles varying ranges of each database "function" occuring "concurrently" (inserts, updates, deletes, fetches, etc). For a BinFeeds setup, we should have stuck with DB2, even with some of the xtra coding it needed. We're going back to it in October. For FoodPlaces (which is what erroneously made us switch to DB2 for BinFeeds) MySQL is ideal and the performance is fine.
The really big problem is that MySQL.com does/used to advertise the following:
From MySQL.COM
MySQL is the world's most popular Open Source Database, designed for speed, power and precision in mission critical, heavy load use.
From that statement (also in the manual), and the FoodPlaces results, as well as more in the manual touting MySQL's ability to handle concurrent operations, we made the decision to switch BinFeeds to MySQL. Bad move - based off good test results for FP and other similar type sites - and more importantly off erroneous, misleading info in the manual.
-Rob
WebMaster:
BinFeeds
XXX Thumbnailed Image Newsgroups but