8 Reasons Not To Use MySQL (And 5 To Adopt It)

Esther Schindler writes "Database decisions are never easy, even — or maybe especially — when one choice is extremely popular. To highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the open-source MySQL DBMS, CIO.com asked two open-source experts to enumerate the reasons to choose MySQL and to pick something else. Tina Gasperson takes the 5 reasons to use MySQL side, and Brent Toderash discusses 8 reasons not to. Note that this isn't an 'open source vs proprietary databases' comparison; it's about MySQL's suitability in enterprise situations."

Comments

Summary of both articles

[foniksonik]

If you're cheap but adventurous and willing to risk a little maturity for a fast growing, easy to support DB, pick MySQL.

If you're a tight-ass who is insecure but is willing to spend money on something that's been around as long as you've been an adult or you've got an expensive DBA who's like this... pick Oracle (or some other proprietary RDBMS).

Databases suck. Big time. ... All of them.

[Qbertino]

It doesn't surprise me that both articles don't really contain much usefull information. It's like two people debating wether FreeDOS or MS DOS is better. No actual real-life or even academic issue.

[rant]
The more and more I do professional projects that go beyond a 'single freelancer' scope the more and more RDBMSes bug the piss out of me.
Databases suck. What we call databases today is nohing much more of a historically grown apocalyptic chaos. With one of the oldest and crappiest programming languages ever as a cornerstone of its technology. A weedy mumbojumbo of wanna-be virtual machines, wanna-be server daemons, makeshift security layers, obstrusive user management and pseudo operating systems and a bazillion proprietary variants of said programming language that make a Perl debugging session look like a walk in the park in comparsion. With features bolted on left right and center. This basically is the case with any current DB in widespread use, be it MySQL, Oracle or anything inbetween.
And if you look at the core of it Database technology and how long it has been that way there isn't much hope that DB's will go anywhere anytime soon. Mostly because people are to thick to f*cking drop the notion that SQL has some sort of value in itself.

It litterally scares me to see many experienced developers who are so brainwashed by unquestioned traditions that they truely believe they need something different than the programming language they're using for their application to handle the persistance layer. A Database PL and 30+ dialects of it from back in the days when we flew to the moon using a slide-ruler as primary means of calculation. A PL that would have any CompSci student score a clean 'F' in compiler and parser building would he deliver something like it as project today. A PL so broken the only other I know that compares to it is Lingo. We waste tons of money and manpower educating DBAs with technology and concepts that are a pain in the ass and not even very tranferable. And the technology doesn't even do it's job very well! Relational Trails, true hassle free de-normalisation, true hassle-free scalabilty - no go. Nowhere. And no, having to need three 200$/hour Oracle DBAs who spent years stuffing their brains with proprietary sh*t to move from one server to 10 is _not_ what I call 'scales well' nowadays. So Postgres (and maybe some others) have entity inheritance. Halleluja. Big fat hairy deal. And the new DB2 can do nested sets with XML (serialized data). I am over-f*cking-welmed. Hello? What time are we living in?

I understand that something like SAP has a hermetic market and they are the proprietary king of the ERP hill with a licence to print money. Their army of suits is the right thing for dealing with CEOs and special SAP devs have to deal with ABAP as a tradeoff. I can get that, it's a marketing thing, not a software thing. They get paid enough anyway.

I also understand that we are still living in the early days of comodity computing and that universal unicode and some other stuff I as a webdeveloper run into every day - and bugs me just as much - still need another few decades to even themselves out. After all I can't force all my users to use Firefox 1.5+ and pure unicode on their clients.

But it's nearly *only* developers that deal with RDBMSes. Our code writes the data and gets the data. But why so many devs who all are in total control of the backend and what it uses put up with this pile of doo-doo we call 'database technology' nowadays is totally beyond me.
[/rant]

My 2 cents.
(SQL-fanboys please cue remarks about how I don't know what I'm talking about below)