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MySQL A Threat to Bigwigs?
Disoculated writes "Is MySQL a threat to bigwigs? is the question asked in CNN's technology section. The article notes that MySQL is running perhaps 20% of the web databases but its revenue is merely 0.02%... yet the company is still making money and putting out an excellent product. Is this a sign that the database market is in for a drastic change? Of course, there's no mention of PostgreSQL or mSQL, but I guess that's typical."
It all boils down to how MySQL 4 is looked upon. Big sites already use MySQL, as seen here, but will version 4 have enough features, be robust enough, and provide the support to convince those running things such as Oracle to switch.
Have you ever looked at MySQL's online documentation? It's wonderful...
Fully indexed, with user comments... I often find new techniques while searching for something completely unrelated. I think the great documentation is one of the reasons why MySQL has taken off, it's just so easy to learn.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
From the posting:
Of course, there's no mention of PostgreSQL or mSQL, but I guess that's typical.
This article has all the signs of being the effort of MySQL's PR firm. Nothing wrong with that; they didn't mention PostgreSQL or other OSS databases because their desired outcome is to increase awareness of MySQL, not the others.
Cheers!
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you probably won't find too many databases on the 'net that need the kind of performance some commercial brands give. so i wouldn't say the drastic change is coming, unless companies start putting their payroll records for the web to see.
our company actually puts mysql onto websites, but no client comes (at least for us) and says 'can you replace my blah-blah db version blah point blah with mysql'. we usually put mysql as a replacement for product databases, forums, etc. which previously were stored in text files or worse. and we usually do this for clients who simply can't afford anything and haven't invested into updating their site in 1-2 years. if they can afford it, they usually already know what they want, and it usually doesn't come free in a cvs snapshot.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
Put a wrapper/installer around MySQL or PostgreSQL that lets you import a SQL Server database dump -- including stored procedures.
Furthermore, look at the dead-tree documentation available for each. Not only are there more MySQL books available than PostgreSQL ones, but the MySQL ones tend to be larger. For example, the New Riders MySQL book is over 400 pages longer than the PostgreSQL one - and their MySQL title isn't exactly brimming with filler. I'm convincesd PostgreSQL adoption will lag behind MySQL until more/better docs show up so people can learn it and its capabilities better.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Even auto incrementing IDs in Postgres are annoyingly difficult compared to MySQL...
Nah, they actually make much more sense in Postgres than they do in MySQL because you can access them using a standard query rather than some bozo non-standard driver extension as in MySQL.
The problem with MySQL is that the lack of basic functionality like triggers, subselects, foreign keys makes it a total PITA except for the simplest applications. Sure you can write code that works around the implementation limitations, but WHY should I have to reinvent something over and over that should BE PART OF THE DATABASE?
You may think this stuff is esoteric, and not needed for the average blog or even e-commerce site, but that's baloney. FKEYS *ARE* needed for just about *ANY* database application except the most trivial - ie. an address book.
MySQL - forget it - it just isn't competitive with other free databases out there.
MySQl being more popular than Postgres has a lot to do with mindshare than product quality. Take me, for instance. I set up apache for the first time a month ago, and I wanted a db server for some things. I had heard of both MySQL and Postgres, but I had been bombarded with the words "LAMP" and MySQL guide/tutorial/howto so many times in the past that my first thought was to give MySQL a try. I found it was already installed on my machine, had lots of documentation, and had no learning curve - no complaints at all. So, Postgres didn't even get a fair consideration from me. Of course, you might say that newbies and students like me don't count, but keep in mind that I might become a database admin some day, at t which point I would have a lot more experience with MySQL than Postgres...
MySQL is good for certain applications, where you only read data, and don't write too much data. This works out especially well for most web sites, since they serve information, but doesn't necessarily allow too much information to be posted by the user.
Lots of message boards on the web use MySQL as their database, because even though people are uploading comments, the amount of data that they upload isn't all that much. Slashdot for example, a popular discussion could prompt 500 messages to be posted in 15 minutes, but still, that's not that much information.
The key word here is transactions, the constant reading/writing, downloading/uploading of information on a massive scale, where each occurence is audited. And I think that's where MySQL has its weakness. PostgreSQL is supposed to be a bit slower, but it takes transactions into account. Red Hat's database software runs on the PostgreSQL engine specifically because of this.
Banking and finance applications require this accountability, because it's just that important. Websites don't need that accountability and overhead, which is why MySQL shines for web servers.
I don't think the writer was confused in that the GPL is legally binding rather than ethically binding. That is, the GPL only legally requires you to redistribute your code if you pass out/sell the binary, not if you make the changes for your in-house setup. However, if I am a business using a heavily modified version of MySQL, adding tons of great features that make it a real player with real enterprise databases- but not sharing or selling the binary, there is still an ethical obligation- not a legal one, pressure from the community at large to share your changes. You see it all the time in the Linux community in especial.
That is how I read that statement, and from that standpoint, the author is correct.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Commit/rollback is an essential component to any decent data management system. Until you are absolutely sure that your data is correct -- that is to say, until you have done all of your transactions on the page successfully -- you should never actually write data to your database. Without using commit/rollback, you are stuck with the haphazard method of trying to manage potentially disastrous records of data showing up in your db.
Your other quote: "And MySQL will blow the doors off of Oracle and other databases in terms of raw speed" is similarly incorrect: MySQL may be faster when you are dealing with a small amount of connections, but as soon as your application starts getting any amount of concurrent users, MySQL is famous for falling down rather rapidly as it strains to write its data to disk.
MySQL cannot scale reliably, period. Having two database systems act as a pool, under MySQL, is a crapshoot at best. Unless you like designing single points of failure into your web applications, stay away from MySQL.
Simply put, if you expect your web application to get any amount of decent traffic (say 100,000 pageviews+ per day), then MySQL is simply not an option. Oracle is simply the standard upon which others can only attempt to compare themselves to. MySQL may be fine for the low-end "check out my k00l dynamic site!!11!!" crowd, but for professional web applications, MySQL has a long, long ways to go.
As long as MySQL doesn't conform to all of ACID, it won't be used by serious players. So all those who use Oracle etc. and need a real RDBMs won't even try to switch. There was a lengthy discussion (or should I say ranting) over this in user comments in the online MySQL manual, but it looks like they removed that. Here's the best link I could find: Manual/ACID.
All those who can live with less, well, IMHO having these features still makes development of sound applications so much easier it pays off having it. PostgreSQL has most of Oracles features, conforms fully to ACID, costs the same or less as MySQL (nothing, compared to MySQL which is virtually useless free without the commercial table handlers), and there are some companies supporting it too.
In my experience an application which does correct error checking and handles faults etc. is not faster in MySQL than in most other DBs, just harder to write. And there are alternatives to PostgreSQL, if you don't like it.
Jürgen Strobel
MySQL is not a threat to the bigwigs, because they compete in different realms. MySQL is a threat to filesystem-storage and BerkeleyDB.
PostgreSQL is a threat to the bigwigs, however.
This is not to say it won't change. MySQL apparently is trying to implement features that would make it compete with real relational databases, but last I heard, views weren't on the list, so I'm not holding my breath.
Other OSS projects that may be a big threat include SAP DB (used to be Adabas D) and... uh... right. There you go. Reply if you're a real DBA and think there's another competitor in the space of true relational RDBMSs. Hint: If you think MySQL could be on the list, you're not thinking of industrial strength databases.
fifth sigma, inc.
- Microsoft Access
- Flat files
- XML files
- Static content
- Client-side scripting
- A large-scale database being drastically underutilized
to perform their various functions. In most cases, those functions would be faster, easier to implement, and simpler to manage using mySQL.For applications with these types of functions, which do not include complex queries, large transaction volumes, rigorous reliability including transaction log backups, recovery, replay, and replication, mySQL represents a major force. Unfortunately for mySQL and those who would have it take over the world, there's not much money available for those applications. Therefore, expect to see mySQL's installed base continue to increase while its revenue-based market share remains small.
For applications which do require features and levels of reliability and capability not offered by mySQL, postgres is the only serious freely-available contender. Even so, postgres is also somewhat less capable than Oracle or DB/2 and will be confined to the middle tier of applications - those which require better reliability and scalability than mySQL can provide but for which funding is scarce. Postgres probably does represent a serious threat to Microsoft's SQL Server, if only because Postgres is platform-independent and supports platforms which can scale beyond anything Windows can run on. Both are otherwise middle-tier products which are not and will never be taken seriously by the largest and most demanding database users.
Who are those users? Banks, government agencies, stock exchanges, payroll and records processing firms, insurance companies, large multi-site call centers, and other huge-scale enterprises. The top proprietary databases offer capabilities that do not yet exist in the Free Software world. For these users, who are less than 1% of all customers but which represent maybe 80% the revenue in the market, there is no substitute. These customers will stay with their existing solutions - Oracle, IBM, Sybase - until the systems running them give out. Then they'll call that company's professional services department and offer them a few million more to upgrade the system. That's the way it works. The system has to be attacked one customer at a time, an expensive and time-consuming process consisting of many lunches, legal bribes, and unrealistic promises.
I think the answer to whether mySQL is a significant threat to dominate the market economically is pretty obvious. Even if mySQL moves up to the middle tier to compete with Postgres and MSSQL and is installed in every application for which it is suitable, the product would still command less than 10% of the revenue in the market.
What a silly question.
I don't know why people insist on comparing MySQL and Oracle. Oracle is huge and bloated, but it runs pretty quick, and is chock full of the sort of features you need if quadruple redundancy and data integrity are a must. If I'm working for a company that can afford the licensing, I'm Oracle all the way...There is no commercial product that really compares.
.0363160 Bulgarian Leva worth
On the other hand, if I'm dealing with a company that can't toss around the kind of money that you have to have for an Oracle DB, MySQL is my number one choice. I can slap the GUI of my choice on it, take care of data security with a hard backup and pocket a few grand of pure profit that I didn't have to spend on liscensing. You can argue Postgres, but I've never run into a case where I couldn't work around those features that haven't been implemented in MySQL yet.
The one thing I can't stand is when someone suggests: "I can't afford Oracle, so lets' go with a MSSQL database." That's like, I can't afford a space shuttle, and a ferarri isn't good enough for me, so I'm going to buy this million dollar llama instead because 1000 marketing agents can't be wrong, right?"
It has all the same feautres as Oracle, it's just that the features in Oracle WORK.
Just my
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
But for some reason people ignore it. Is it because it is created by a company and not a group ? Or is it that everybody has already chosen their favorite free DB and won't look at others ?
Sure beats me.
Actually in 7.3 you can finally drop columns, fwiw.
I don't know about MySQL 4, but the biggest problem is that MySQL seemed to emphasise speed over robustness.. Large scale benchmarking in the 3-tree caused corrupted databases. postgres has had a journal for a little bit now (don't know how long though). Plus postgres's version-based rows allows for some really high performance parallel transaction control.
It all comes down to what you are really trying to do.. If you're willing to lose a day's worth of work, and you're not going to have more than a couple dozen simultaneous connections, then MySQL is probably good for you.
Perhaps 4 has allowed MySQL to catch up with Postgres / surpase it, but it's had too murky a history for a lot of businesses who rank data-integrity number 1.
-Michael
I can. I have, many times.
These lead me to suspect that your implementation was broken. I've never seen them happen.
Hey, what? You can't store dollar signs and garbage in an integer or float, you shouldn't be trying to feed that to your db in the first place! If you want to do that kind of thing, amidst a `live' table is not the place for it: use a temp table and do it properly. Whis is probably why the PostgreSQL people didn't implement it.
I hope you've got a lifespan like Methuselah's, then. PostgreSQL does stored procedures in a variety of languages already. Your post does sound like a BASIC programmer grunting and squealing when presented with a real language that insists on him doing stuff like decalring variables, and has scoping etc, forcing him to do `work' (actually investing in manageability) that he didn't have to do before - at least, not up front and in small doses.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
it happens, i work for a major company, and due to a wiring error and a mistake made by power techs, major switches and about 20 servers went down, taking out some major production systems.
:-) And hard. But it comes back up cleanly, which is the important part.
So no matter what happens, your database will eventually fail and lose power. Even if the power is 100%, the db software and/or OS will crash.
And yes, oracle crashes
None of the above is new information. Just my personal summary. In short, (ie. in troll) the argument seems to be simply: "Yes, mysql is pathetic, but so are most of us." Great.