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Free Software, Get What You Pay For?
An anonymous reader writes "The Xooglers blog is running an interesting article on how big businesses may start out running free software but there is always the continued question of 'Should we go with something "real"?' at some point in their evolution. How often are technologies like PHP, Perl, and MySQL being pushed out once startups get managers who know nothing about the technology and only worry about name brands?"
I think it's unfortunate but in the IT world it is generally true there is no relationship between quality of software and cost . Some of the best software I've ever used has been free, some of the worst software I've ever used has been expensive.
IT and technology and particularly software can be (is) difficult to understand on many levels: functionality; efficiency; ergonomics; stability; etc. In a book (and God, I wish I could remember the title of this book -- one of my faves) talking about manipulating perceptions one of the discussions centered on the fact that when all other criteria are indeterminate or unavailable, it is human nature to assign credibility and worth based on price or cost. This is rife in the world of software.
Unfortunately, I see this as something taken advantage of rather that properly addressed.... sigh.
Time is money.
Free and/or open source software such as Linux, the GNU tools, Mozilla, Open Office, GNOME, KDE, MySQL, Apache, Postgres, and many other wildly successful tools have been worked on for countless hours by skilled programmers and designers. Whether out of the kindness of their own hearts, desire for recognition, or a business investment, people have spent millions of hours designing, developing, testing, and documenting Free Software. Consider for a moment how much it woud have cost to pay each and every one of those people for their time. That's the amount of money that hass been put into Free Software.
If someone gives you a mansion, you don't assume it's worthless because you didn't pay for it. The worth is still there; someone else already paid for it.
The nice example given in the article clearly shows clueless managers and not convincing enough developers.
In small startups you may pick it because it's free. In giants like Google you pretty much disregard costs of software purchase and just compare features. "Does it do all we need, well?" is the first and ultimately relevant question. All the others are secondary once the only competitors in the field have been estabilished. In case of databases there is no competition here, and all discussions should have ended at that first question. Does it do all we need, well? Yes, NOW it does, all we needed was added, it works fine. Does anything else do all we need, well? HELL NO! MySQL is an absolute master in the field of speed, when properly optimized beats everything and everyone (at costs of all the quirks we had to fight in the meantime). Everything else is much slower, and most choices will be simply way too slow for the expected workload.
Free (Gratis) or not, doesn't matter here at all. Open Source matters, if it doesn't do what we need, we can get it to do it, but that's not essential.
Managers who don't get it, won't work long. Simply because they will keep failing delivering working projects on time.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
rofl, you got my 5 cents.
... where did that reliability just go ? it's the other way around, transactions create reliability, when errors happen, data should not be committed because it disrupts the whole system. imagine that a bank wouldn't have transactions and you transfer 100$ to your mom's account. after it has been discounted from your account, the disk is full and it can't be added to your mom's account. you will lose 100$ and the bank will show you the finger.
are these people for real ?
People who push the "no transactions" FUD also forget that transaction support often reduces the reliability of applications
this really threw me off the chair. come on people, if you mess up 10 rows in different tables along in 1 transaction, you can fix it all with 1 blink of the eye (rollback) if 1 insert/update/delete/whatever fails
The truth is that it's not the end of the world if you mess up a row or two in most databases
Google AdWords definitely is not "most databases", if you create zillion dollar bills for microsoft for advertising excel, you can't mix up this row. actually you can, but microsoft will sue your brains out.
Mysql people that think that messing up some database tables are not a big thing oftect excuse themselves with "to err is human". I'd like to see if you think the same way if your car building factory thought that "to err is human", and forgot to add brakes to your car.
You really don't need to expierence loss caused by ignoring transactions more than once in your life to get your fingers permanently burned.
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I hate it when users of superior databases fud over mysql. But even more do i hate that mysql zombies don't realize how mindless and incompetent their own comments on the issue are.
Sweet tiny mysql has kindof added the features but i have seen no sign "stable" anywhere just yet, so using the latest mysql versions and it's fresh transaction is a bit better than no transactions but it still isnt "it", and you shouldn't trust millions of dollars into it's tables.
If i need performance and can avoid transactions without causing dataloss, i choose mysql for speed, otherwise i choose postgresql which still is superior in it's features but a bit slower in speed.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Perl is definitely a prototyping language. Rolling out anything serious in Perl is, let me put it that way, unwise. Performance about 10 times worse than C/C++, bug-prone syntax, source=executable approach, all great for quick and dirty fixes, not for serious projects.
PHP is good for making DHTML and that's all. If you want something serious, get a backend in a mature lower-level language, launch it through PHP to get things done, post results to pages generated through PHP. Anything more in PHP is definitely dangerous, and always a hack.
MySQL - Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's not a toy/prototyping/testing database. Sure it's easy to use and gratis, so integrating it with quick&dirty hacks in PHP or Perl feels natural. But it's like recreational riding a thoroughbred horse, a smooth, easy fun ride. And if you try to put the thoroughbred to a cart, the effects are definitely poor. Jumps? Okay, not impressive though. Cross-terrain, endurance, dressage? Sucks. It's not a versatile horse, and MySQL is not a versatile database. Just put the thoroughbred to gallop and you'll be far first in the means of speed, same about MySQL. Give it a highly specific, simple task where speed is essential. Not synchronizing sales over the whole corporation, not optimizing routes for train schedule, not managing an air traffic tower, where the complexity requires really sophisticated solutions. You put it to pull a single random ad that matches a keyword from a database of ten millions and increase display counter on associated field by one. And do it ten times a second. That's the kind of work which MySQL is made for, and that's where all the alternatives suck.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
That simply illustrates the articles point: RHEL is expensive therefore it's considered real and not a toy.
Java is so clumsy that, if you are doing something with it, you always start by doing a lot of design before you code.
Come again? You code without software design ? Tell me exactly how do you write C or C++ code without designing, or python code ? (and who let you near a computer in the first place
Yeah you can definitely write a 5-line perl hack without designing, but if you write just about anything that is worth a dime, you better plan first and dont fix/patch/alter the stuff afterwards for years. Maybe it's just that i have not had 1-day or 1-week projects for a while, but i usually don't write one line of code on the first day at all. I prefer brainstorming, research and analyzing that will save me a headache and hopefully give me a few extra days at the end of the project to polish stuff.
Java is not slow when code goes into millions of lines, it's the coders who mess it up. I have seen working huge java code, i have written huge working java code which is fast. You are still being fooled around the fact that the swing gui used by java is slow and that java is often used along with oracle that is slow. Don't let this fool you. Java is as fast as C++ in pure arithmetics. If you really need some freaky speed boost, you can write the speedwhore code in C and JNI to it. You can also have your pointer tribble there if you need it, but Java is designed so that it would avoid the need pointers in the first place (all the regular objects in java are actually pointers). Besides, Java is the only thing that will work on almost any platform. And this is what counts in year 2005.
C and C++ are not platform independant and that is what you rarely want to use nowadays. You can never know if your stupid management wants to run this on windows or linux or even sun tomorrow. And once you get your code compatible with all major os's , the source is so #define'd that it's nearly impossible to manage. I won't even start about the library dependancies.
Just use every language where it belongs and don't go around bashing java or anyone else with accusations that can't take 1 mm of water.
Oh well, ok, you can bash php, i have nothing against that.
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
Transactions make applications *fail* reliably, they don't make them *work* reliably. They simplify things at one level by bundling them up and abstracting them, so when they do fail it's hard to know exactly why they failed. The dreaded 'we can't do what you want at this time, try later' horribly vague error message is the result. Transactions are no replacement for serious fault analysis.