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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!"
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 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.
I'm disappointed that you were moderated as a troll. I think the way you said it was a little off the mark, but your ultimate point is correct. The major disconnect between the "free" software guys and the commercial software guys is that they're not on the same playing field.
The "free" software guys say things like, "Our software is politically and morally superior because it's free," and then they launch into a big discussion of liberty and rights.
The commercial software guys look at the bottom line. Take SGI for example. When they decided to build a big, scalable server system designed around the IA-64 chip family, they were faced with the prospect of doing a lot of work to port IRIX from the MIPS architecture. On the other hand, there was Linux, which needed a lot of work to be scalable and reliable, but was easier to use for this purpose than IRIX was. So they're running Linux. Do you think it's for political reasons? Shit, no. It's about costs and profitability.
This is, incidentally, exactly as it should be.
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.
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