MySQL & Open Source Code Quality

dozek writes "Perhaps another rung for the Open Source model of software development, eWeek reports that an independent study of the MySQL source code found it to be "in fact six times better than that of comparable commercial, proprietary code." You can read the eWeek write-up or the actual research paper (reg. required)."

Comments

If you would RTFA...

[Theatetus]

...they quantified it by dividing verified defects by lines of code. MySQL had 0.09 bugs/KLOC while the "commercial" defect density was 0.53 bugs/KLOC. (Their use of the term "commercial" confused me since MySQL is, after all, a "commercial" project, just an open-source one.)

Re:If you would RTFA...

[scrytch]

If only it were MySQL just lacking features that would, after much mudslinging at the ideas themselves, be grudgingly retrofitted into a new table type. MySQL's brokenness goes deeper than that.

MySQL's attitude toward data integrity can be summed up as "if the constraint can't be satisfied, do it half-assed anyway". I find myself having to write application code to manage data integrity with MySQL, something I can take for granted with a real database.

Re:Duh!

[James Thompson]

Need a particular reason? Take your pick. http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html

Re:Duh!

[pyite]

Up until recently, MySQL had no transaction or atomic operation support. As such, you need to write application code to trap problems. Whereas with Oracle, when you run an atomic operation, you know without certainty whether the query failed in its entirety. I also believe stored procedure support is somewhat lacking in MySQL (however, there is that new Java function support). The MySQL 3 tree does not enforce constraints which is something most essential for data integrity. MySQL does not have subrow locking, whereas enterprise databases do. Once again, MySQL is great. I use it. However, it is not enterprise.