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MySQL To Be Ikea Of The Database Market
Rob wrote to mention an article discussing MySQL's intent to become 'the Ikea of databases'. From the piece: "While new entrants into the open source database market, such as EnterpriseDB and Pervasive Software, have made no secret of their intentions to chase Oracle's market share, Mr Mickos said MySQL is happy to leave them to it. 'We are thankful that they are there to define the market, there is no product if you're the only vendor,' he said. "Pervasive and EnterpriseDB are going up against Oracle. We don't want to be in that space, we don't want to take the heat from Oracle. If you're working in a zoo you don't want to be the one who has to brush the teeth of the lion.'"
Yes, Windows brought MySQL to me.
I host my site on a commercial service, and previously I was stuck with using Access as my DB, unless I wanted to pay big SQL Server bucks. My site crashed 5 or 6 times a day because of the load on the database.
Finally my hosting service started to offer MySQL, for free...
My site stopped crashing, and now everything loads a lot faster. (I haven't converted the entire thing over to MySQL, but enough to stop the crashing.)
If MySQL were not free, I would not have converted. If it were not on Windows, I would not have converted.
But now I see it as a real possibility for use at work.
No reason to lie.
I'm a PostgreSQL fanboy, but I hope these guys pull it off. A lot of poeple don't realize that what's good for one open source project is good for all of us (historical emotional baggage aside).
The 5.0 release looks to be the biggest in the history of the database. I say good luck to them. Has anybody played around with their functions implmentations?
Wow, what a dumb, dumb statement.
With all the ground work that MySQL has made, it is starting to be seriously considered an enterprise grade system. I can just see managers using some of these quotes to show that it's really just a toy, not a real DB like "Oracle." Would have been better just to say nothing.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
That's something of a straw man argument; I don't see sort of comments modded very high, probably because plenty of mods have had to deal with mysql in the business world, and the rest have seen enough critical commentary over the last few years to know not to drink the kool-aid.
I saw lots of posts modded high mentioning all of MySQL's various critical flaws, as well as a number of posts mentioning PostgreSQL is better (a number explaining for non-DBAs why, say, things like transactions are important), maybe how the author moved to PostgreSQL and likes it better...but I can't ever remember having seen a single post saying "I used PostgreSQL and went to MySQL", except by people with the vocabulary and English skills of a 16 year old, think transactions are for wussies, are impressed at how fast MySQL handles simple queries on small datasets, and like that they don't have to worry about case sensitivity in their queries.
The most poignant comment I saw said that while everyone else had forged ahead, MySQL was just catching up to "state of the art" half a decade ago or more. We're not really talking luxury features- more "features a proper database should have".
I don't have the link to the story handy, but it was just yesterday, I believe. I strongly encourage anyone who hasn't read that thread to do so now.
Please help metamoderate.
Why all these crappy slashdot posts about MySQL we have been seen lately? They speak as if MySQL where an uncontested champion in the free-software database arena. This is far from true. Many articles doesn't even mention PostreSQL. Many of them says "Now MySQL is a big player because it's got... transactions" (!).
I think there's interest here in building up the idea that MySQL is important. There's currently no reason to use MySQL, because other products already do what it does and better.
It's not the PG installer, it's the fact that Windows is now part of the official release that matters.
Still, though, mindshare is a considerable issue. There's a lot more people familiar with MySQL admin and it's quirks than Postgres. And, a lot of F/OSS uses MySQL as a data store by default. While it is not uncommon to have both PG and MySQL as a choice, if there is only one choice out of the two it is more often MySQL than PG, although counterexamples are sure to exist.
It will be interesting to see how these two projects evolve with respect to each other and how they end up positioned in a few years, now that a lot of the "first cut" elimination criteria have been eliminated (e.g. no subqueries/triggers for MySQL, no official Windows support for Postgres).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Ahh... c'mon. Some of their stuff is expensive - check out the kitchens next time your in the store. I can't see a college student spending that kind of money.
If speed is your only criteria about what database is best, you should probably use SQLite. The last time they benchmarked its speed, it was significantly faster than both MySQL and PostgreSQL.
But the real point of this post is that making speed your only criteria does make you sound like a blind moron. A database is much more than its speed characteristics. Other considerations are: quality of documentation, richness of data types, SQL features supported, options for locking and concurrency, options for writing procedures in the database, facilities for partitioning and controlling the growth of the data store, and much more.
If these are not considerations for you, you are probably working on toy problems that would work just fine with SQLite.