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

Stereo types?

[tomstdenis]

How much sampling did they do? Or did they just take MySQL and some bum-wad county program and compare them?

That's like saying all negros are criminals because the TV show COPS shows them being criminals.

I'd think a left-wing pro commie gaggle of hippies such as /. would be able to see past stereotypes already.

Live in the now man!

MySQL quirks

[Futurepower(R)]

I find the MySQL gotchas frightening:

• 1. General SQL
  • 1.1 NULL, or when NULL IS NOT NULL
  • 1.2 AUTO_INCREMENT
  • 1.3 ENUM
  • 1.4 Case sensitivity in CHAR / VARCHAR fields
  • 1.5 Variable length CHAR fields
  • 1.6 VARCHAR's trailing blank allergy
  • 1.7 DEFAULT NOW()
  • 1.8 INSERT INTO ... SELECT ...
  • 1.9 Comments beginning with --
  • 1.10 UNION and literal values
  • 1.11 Division by zero
  • 1.12 'concatenation' || 'or'
  • 1.13 What goes in - isn't (always) what comes out
  • 1.14 February 31st

• 2. Database Definition
  • 2.1 Silent Column Specification Changes
  • 2.2 Implicit primary key
  • 2.3 Supported syntax, unsupported feature
  • 2.4 Whoops, no InnoDB table support

• 3. Foreign Keys and Referential Integrity
  • 3.1 ALTER TABLE ... SET NOT NULL
  • 3.2 Ignoring constraints
  • 3.3 ERROR 1005
  • 3.4 ON UPDATE CASCADE / SET NULL

• 4. Transactions and InnoDB tables
  • 4.1 Transactions on mixed table types
  • 4.2 Altering InnoDB tables

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Re:Debatable scale

[TheMidget]

It supports constraints, you say? Wrong. It supports constraint syntax. It doesn't actually execute the constraints (gee, that's helpful, isn't it?).

wrong! (if you have a version more recent than 3.23.43b). Other constraints than FOREIGN KEY followed, or will follow shortly.

In general, constraints work best with the INNODB (new) table format than with ISAM (old format). This is because proper constraint handling depends on availability of rollback

Stored procedures are being implemented in our version 5.0 development tree.

They were talking about a particular type of stored procedures here (PL/SQL). However, you can write stored procedures in other languages, such as Java and also Perl, as has been described December's Linux Journal on page 84.

Online backup? Nope

Wrong. If you use INNODB tables, you can do an online backup (without disturbing current operations, and without setting any intrusive locks). Yes, it is a commercial tool, but we can hardly object to this, we are comparing to databases where the whole software is commercial!

reading a bogus whitepaper.

What do you mean by this. If you hit google, you'll see that the overwhelming majority of links agree that MySQL is superior to Microsoft's offering.