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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.
We used to use mySQL, but moved to postgreSQL for performance reasons, and we're glad we have.
On the postgreSQL general mailing list, people rarely talk about mySQL anymore (let along mSQL). It's (mySQL) is generally regarded as a good alternative to the Berkeley DB stuff (i.e. non-relational), whereas postgreSQL these days gets lots of traffic from Oracle people wanting to go somewhere cheaper.
Oracle mustn't be happy, I'd think.
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!
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.
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, unfortunately, a SQL interface to a bunch of files based on various index sequential access methods. It gets its speed by ignoring transactions, triggers, stored procedures and other things that, when your company is successful, will need in its database. mySQL's replication is also not guaranteed and when its spotty, it doesn't tell you.
The open source DB community is a powerful force with a lot of potential and a lot of success. That success is in markets where transactions are low and/or not critical to the customer.
mySQL and others need to ensure that they have these features:
- stored procedures (implementation outside of the A in ACID aren't complete - perl, java, python, etc)
- Referential integrity, foreign keys, transactions
- hot backups where you don't have to take the database down to get a backup with guaranteed integrity.
- reliable replication (argue away, only shareplex, NT SQL server & Sybase have it today)
- sub selects
- temp tables
- function based indicies
- automatic partitioning
- rollback (true rollback w/transactions)
- triggers
- block and row level locking. A select on
a 50 million row table shouldn't lock
the table.
- joins that do not lock tables due to full table scans
There are a lot of good reasons for using mySQL as a platform to begin the development of a project. For personal use, it's hard to beat! If you are a professional in a company that needs to support real clients with real data with real guarantees, spend your money on a real database.Where do you want to spend your R&D money? On your product or on the database that does most of the things you need, but not all of the things you need. Don't you want to spend your time building the product that pays your salary and makes your customers happy? Why spend time on the database, just buy something that works.
One more thing, a not unreasonable architecture for a database driven application is:
- UI layer
- Business rule/application layer
- Application Programming Interface
- Stored procedures (potentially hundreds)
- Database
Good luck.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.
A couple years ago I started a large hardware conversion project for a major telco. One of the requirements was a fairly large database to support real time call processing. I had already told the customer that I would only do the job if it was on a non-Microsft platform so I didn't need to worry about them wanting SQL Server. However, since they were a large telco I assumed that they wanted a well know commercial product so I proposed either Oracle or Informix - their preference. Their director of DP said something like "it's too bad we can't use MySQL" since they were using it for some smaller applications, unknown to me. My next comment was "do you want to use MySQL?". The answer was "yes, provided it could do the job". I said "I will make it do the job". Now it's been about two years and MySQL has almost faded into the background. It just runs, unlike my experiences with Oracle and Informix where you have to constantly administer them. That's my personal experience, your mileage may vary depending on your skill and attitude.
- 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.
that have received little comment so far:
* Firebird (ne: Borland Interbase)
* SAP-DB (ne: Adabas-D)
Both are good, high quality, commercial or formally commercial products released under an open source license. (interbase public license and GPL respectively)
Further, SAP-DB has excellent commerical support available from SAP, the company, at or better than the same level of responsiveness as, say, Oracle support.
Both are fantastic, enterprise level full ACID RDBMS's with all the great management features a heavy duty shop could want:
* online backups,
* transaction logs,
* restore to point in time
* subselects, views, rules/triggers, procedures, etc.
* great storage management
Check 'em out.
-- Pat
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred
Great discussions on this thread! We are reading them carefully to learn what we can do better.
Let me just comment on the overall impact of having such articles appear on Fortune.com and CNN.com:
The article is indeed the result of PR work done by MySQL AB, but the value of it will benefit the entire free software / open source community. We need to get many more business articles out there, so let's be happy about this one, and let's produce more of them!
Although this very article mentions MySQL only, please have a look at other articles where we at MySQL AB consistently mention the other open source databases. Here are two such articles on prominent business-focused sites (one of which, incidentally, is powered by MySQL):
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http://www.open-mag.com/01943583279.htm
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id
Our ambition is not to be a threat to bigwigs per se, but to make superior database software available AND affordable to all. With your help we can do it.
Marten Mickos
CEO, MySQL AB