Sun's Mickos Is OK With Monty's MySQL 5.1 Rant

narramissic writes "Back on November 29, MySQL developer Michael Widenius trashed Sun's decision to give MySQL 5.1 a 'generally available' designation in a now-infamous blog post. Widenius warned users to be 'very cautious about MySQL 5.1' because 'there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.' And now we get Sun's response. In an interview Monday, Marten Mickos, senior VP of Sun's database group, said, 'I learned over many years about the benefits and the painfulness of absolute transparency in open source. A little bit of debate never hurts. This is part of being an open-source company. ... People are free to blog about what they want.' Doubtless, this will do nothing to end the debate over whether Widenius will follow fellow MySQL co-founder David Axmark's lead and leave Sun."

Comments

Re:Uhm

[WillDraven]

While I think the AC may be overstating this a bit, I do think the term 'infamous' is being a bit overused here. Ask any random person on the street about this issue and you're probably going to get a response along the lines of "What's MySQL?"

Debate?

[FranTaylor]

What is the debate? MySQL releases with known crashing bugs. Noone is disputing that.

Is the debate over whether or not it is okay to ship a database with known crashing bugs?

It really surprises me to hear someone from Sun saying that one can debate the merits of a crashing database. If this is the expected level of performance from MySQL, no wonder people shun it. At the very least they could have called it a beta or rc release, that would set the expectation level at something approaching reality.

Re:Uhm

[Anonymous Coward]

We use MySQL in a number of critical aspects of our company. I'd rather have a company be honest and let me know I might have some issues with this new release than pretend there are no issues. That lets me stay with my current version and upgrade later.

Rather be on the stable blunt edge in critical infrastructure, not the bleeding edge.

To their credit

[coryking]

MySQL has never been a stable database program. I've never had any other database system that just blows a database table at random. Nothing is more exciting then having a website go down because one of the tables got marked "corrupt" and you have to go "REPAIR TABLE". The damn thing might not even have a load on it and it will blow up!

First of all, what is MySQL doing that corrupts tables during normal operation and second of all? Seriously, a database shouldn't crash like that, ever.

Second of all, it might as well try to auto-repair the damn table. I mean, I've never had it loose data, only somehow decide the table was "corrupt" and then taken offline. And who cares if you do it automatically and it looses data, this is MySQL we are talking about here! They make no claim about data integrity and the user base doesn't even know what that means (must be a car or some "enterprise" feature used only by NASA and Fortune 50 companies)! I mean, 0000-00-00 is a valid date according to them!

But alas, this is MySQL we are talking about here. I mean, it isn't like you are putting any sensitive data on it right? I mean, surely only a fool would use it for anything besides storing data like "number of shoes in my closet" or "number of purses owned by the wife", right?

Good 'ol MySQL. I mean, what fun is a database server that is consistent or predictable?

Re:To their credit

[MikeBabcock]

I'm sorry, I forgot that many developers expect their storage engine to BE their application instead of writing good code themselves.

Shouldn't you be validating your dates or numbers or other values BEFORE sending them to your storage system? Shouldn't the database's job be to store your data in a logical fashion so its easy to find later, and then find it when you query it?

I don't understand people who expect the database to replace the middleware of their application.

Re:Same old, same old

[/dev/trash]

Except that mySQL is open Source, how can they kill the copy that I have on my hard drive and can re-distribute?

Re:crashing database == lost data

[multipartmixed]

> If your database is crashed and is no longer capable of accepting data, how is that
> different from losing data? Go ahead and explain that with a straight face.

Well, for example, losing bank deposits is a lot worse than not accepting them because the database is down. This illustrates why in database land it's important to never lose data, and to always know that the contents of your database is correct.

Or, to explain in more detail...

There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.

And the unknown unknowns are most dangerous when it comes to RDBMS integrity.