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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.'"
Well then where my steaming plate of Swedish meatballs? Huh? Where are they?
And how can I deck out my house in mid-century modern MySQL? I'd like to see that.
Pfft, yet another tease.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
That every installation comes with an Allen key and crappy instructions?
Do you want the Svansbo or the Dalsfor installation?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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.
That should nip the "MySQL is a replacement for Oracle under all circumstances" posts that always appear whenever MySQL is discussed on slashdot. It should, but it won't.
OIn a different note, isn't the "Ikea of databases" space already a little overcrowded? There's Firebird, McKoi, One$DB/Daffodil DB, Cloudscape, Postgres etc. Guess MySQL already pretty much own that space, so this is just a reaffirmation that they're sticking to their knitting. Doing what they do best. Very wise.
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.
...you can take it home without a big transport, you have to figure out what they mean by odd instructions and you have to perform the assembly yourself, but when you are done you can save a bundle if your time is not that valuable.
Since when are stored procedures, triggers, and views (freaking VIEWS) enterprise features? Log shipping or automatic failover are enterprise features. Procs and views are basics.
I think Mysql is cleaning up the donkey poop, myself.
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?
Unlike Nintendo, I think the MySQL people have a point though. You wouldn't want a $100k Oracle DB for a website that can be handled by $5k of white boxes running MySQL, just like you probably wouldn't expect a stuck-up billion dollar business to use an open source DB.
I would search through benchmarks and wonder, "What kind of database defines me as a person?" We used to read pornography. Now it was debug prints. I had it all. Even the opteron optimized version that can take over 2Gb / process, but it still maxes at 4Gb due to 32bit pointers - proof it were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of wherever. I am Jack's wasted memory.
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.
Expensive, hard to setup, crumbles after a couple of years?
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.
Have you actually performed side-by-side comparisons using your own data? I have on many projects. Some are faster in Postgres. Some are faster in MySQL. Guess which one I use? Both. I use Postgres when it is faster. I use MySQL when it is faster. I refuse to be a blind moron like so many on Slashdot: Postgres is best. No, MySQL is best. Who cares - does it run Linux? No, Debian. That is Linux. I use BSD! Who cares, we're here to bash Windows!!!
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
That just proves to me that he completely understands the user space of MySQL.
Thousands of webmasters and home-based coders don't want a competitor to Oracle, we want something that gets he job done quickly, efficiently and affordably.
This idea that every product has to become a behemoth and compete for world domination is the stake through the heart of many a project. Being content with distributing in bulk to an extremely thankful user-base is what it's all about as far as I'm concerned with MySQL. This ensures that most open-source projects will continue to be MySQL oriented, LAMP will continue to dominate the OSS Content Management Services market, and for those that determine it's just not "good enough" for what they want to do there are plenty of alernatives to expand your feature set.
K.I.S.S. is what MySQL has always been about, and I give the guy props for admitting they'll never have the desire nor ability to compete with Oracle.
If you're half as beautiful naked, you'd be 4 times as beautiful with twice as many clothes on.
If you're happy with MySQL than great.
Its offered at most ASP's for next to nothing.
But just to let you know PostgreSQL 8.x now offers a native build for Windows - and is extremely powerful.
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.
Windows sucks !
You are not your relational database!
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
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.
Bingo. I couldn't agree with you more. MySQL is fairly lightweight, easy to use for many newbies, and provides some pretty advanced features for most tasks. It has its quirks to be careful of, but ultimately does its job as a DBMS. MySQL is extremely quick on the read, but suffers from locking issues and concurrency issues on the write. So it's fantastic for the Web- which is why you see it so often on hosting providers and other similar providers- it's quick to put Web content into. It's quick to hold userIDs/passwords that aren't updated frequently. It's quick in anything where reads are heavy and writes are sparse. Service providers like it because it's not too resource intensive for read-heavy uses (web sites) and it has a great user model (store users in a database, provide per-database permissions and hide all other customers from seeing other people's databases) for many-user systems.
PostgreSQL does a fantastic job with sites needing more complexity. If you need to start with transactions, need good read/write performance, and feel that data integrity is key (generally things dealing with dollars, accounting systems, online applications, booking systems, etc) then of course the way to go really is PostgreSQL if supported. If it's not (as it is with many hosts), there's always some MySQL transactional support with row-level locking, but it almost seems like a hack. (as a note, PGSQL8.1Beta2 provides support for 'roles', but to my knowledge still doesn't hide other people's databases).
Anyway- Each has it's ups and downs. Service providers love MySQL because it's fast, cheap, easy, and keeps users seperate. PostgreSQL I've seen abused a bit too much for things it's not to be used for, and that has a huge performance hit. Why the bickering? Everyone thinks their tool is bigger
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
"Seriously though, IKEA is a store full of very interesting, but not entirely useful gadgets." :)
Interesting but not entirely useful gadgets like, hmmmmm, beds, tables, chairs, couches, wardrobes, cupboards, kitchens, plates, forks, pots and pans, curtains, mirrors, carpets...?
- Schloönge
- Loob
- Vügeena
Ad nauseum...blog |
So I guess this would make Microsoft SQL Server the Wal-Mart of Databases.
It's the one a lot of people go to because they can't be bothered to shop around.
(Please note, the above is intended as humor. I earn my living working with SQL Server, and happen to think it's a fine product, but there are a lot of products that use it because it's Microsoft and for no other reason.)
Of course, all this begs the question, is Oracle the Target or the Sears of Databases?
The Sears hardware and appliance lines make me suspect Oracle is the Sears, but Target is bigger than Sears, which would reflect Oracle's install base better.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Now that Postgres has a pretty easy to use Windows installer, the benefits of MySQL are gone (though it befuddles me that *Windows*, of all things is what made MySQL successful in the first place).
The obvious counter argument is now that MySQL 5.0 supports strict data integrity, stored procedures, triggers, cursors, information schema, and database links, the benefits of Postres are gone.
But that too would be an oversimplification. Really, they're both excellent products, and which one you use is a matter of buisness needs and personal preference.
UPDETE TEBLE SET Cuoontry = 'Sveden' VHERE Neme-a = 'Svedeesh Cheff';
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.
I don't care if MySQL is VHS compared to the postgres beta max... I'm sick and tired of people coming along and and trying to convert people to whatever their favourite technology is like it's the one true religion.
Give it up... I don't care if you like PG, Ruby on Rails or stink on shit for that matter. I'll use what I feel is right for my projects. The only thing this kind of "evangelism" generates is animosity towards whatever product/technology/turd you're pushing on others.
BlackNova Traders
We'll need to hire the Swedish Chef to figure out what the hell everything means now.
Actually the windows performance of postgres is pretty up to par to the unix performance you have to tweak the settings like you have to do it in unix (read the various postgres performance guides). The performance used to be bad, but not anymore, since the cygwin layer has been dropped.
Neo: It's not the one?
Oracle: Sorry kid. You've got the right product, but you are waiting for something.
Neo: Like what?
Oracle: Like for this coupon to be valid. It's not good for another week.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2005_oct/inn o.html
Perhaps MySQL is saying "We aren't competing with Oracle" because Oracle has MySQL in a difficult position. Oracle just purchased InnoBase, the makers of InnoDB. They get to "renegotiate" the terms next year. MySQL may end up having to drop the InnoDB storage engine, and transactions along with it. After all, it's Oracle's option.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.