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MySQL Founder Starts Open Database Alliance, Plans Refactoring
Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.
I didn't ask if it worked. I asked in what scenario it would be a superior option (to the well-informed application architect, of course). The only real reason you gave is that you don't know much about Postgres. That means you're not really qualified to answer the question.
Does it scale better? Does it have better security? Is it easier to manage in some way? Is there a killer feature its two closest competitors lack? Those might be actual answers to the question. "I don't know much about it" is not an answer.
It's certainly commonly perceived that Postgres will scale better, and that it has a rather complete featureset. If this is indeed the case, I can't see a reason to select MySQL for a new project. Why limit yourself?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Oracle has a number of lighter DB products, including Oracle Express Edition (XE) which is free (as in beer). They don't have anything (that I know of) that does the same kind of multi-backend thing that MySQL does, but certainly they have a number of products whose market niches at least overlap with that of MySQL.
(Also, Oracle is a lot more than a database development company and has certainly been more aggressively pushing into other areas; I suspect that their acquisition of Sun was more focussed on the non-MySQL parts of Sun than on MySQL.)
MySQL is better because I know how to use it and it works well enough. If I were to switch to Postgres, then I would have to spend time learning it.
My manager would rather me move some other feature forward rather than replace database A with database B.
When we hire somebody new, it is easier to find candidates who already know MySQL. That matters too.
-ec
...I saw in one presentation their chief architect did. They had no complaints about it; apparently it scales brilliantly as long as the db schema is very simple.
For heavy-weight databases though, I gather it's not so good.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I can't imagine a scenario when I would chose to use MySQL (or MS SQL, for that matter).
I work for a Fortune 500 company. We use MySQL with J2EE and Hibernate in a production environment. Postgres would be our fall-back option if MySQL ever stopped doing the trick for us, but it scales well to thousands of users.
MySQL can easily be configured for use as a production-quality database. We also use Oracle and DB2 on an i5 for certain purposes, but our biggest app (in terms of company scope and $$) employs MySQL in the back-end.
That's why :-P
"You could almost look at defense of Microsoft as a form of the Stockholm syndrome." -neapolitan
For instance if you never delete from a table there's no need to bother trying to vacuum it.
Not quite. Because of the way postgres operates (MVCC) UPDATEs will result in space appearing in table structures too. With an MVCC based DB nothing is updated in-place (actually, in any good DB nothing is updated in-place, but with MVCC this is more obviously implied by any good description of how things work with multiple distinct transactions present). When a row is updated new version is added and the old version is removed when the transaction is complete and no other transactions might refer to the old copy. This has significant advantages for some use cases and loads, and some disadvantages in other
The wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control) isn't a great description though there is a bit more relevant information in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapshot_isolation.
I've not used postgres much in anger, so I'm no expert, but personally I thought that being able to manually schedule cleanup was a good idea performance wise.
Because MyISAM, which is what most MySQL users use, is not fucking ACID compliant.
Take a look at the potential problems. Take a look at recommended use cases: "Tables which contain read-only data, throw-away data, data which can be quickly re-generated." Are you bloody kidding me!?
I can't believe my eyes when I read questions (or posts) such as the above. Because it betrays your huge ignorance. Every man and his dog has heard of MySQL and is probably using it, true. But it's also true that most of them have no bloody idea of what ACID is or why it's desirable, or that MySQL with its MyISAM tables goes completely happy-go-lucky on the whole concept. These are the same people who probably don't bother using foreign keys, or have never even heard of transactions, or can't think why they'd need them.
Sure, MySQL offers InnoDB, which is supposed to rectify those issues. But how does it go about it, may I ask? Why, take a looksy. It's an entire bloody SECTION of the manual, which goes to great lengths to explain all kinds of issues and exceptions to the rules and whatnot. Summary: "It locks rows like this, except if it's a full moon then you have to blink your left eye every five seconds, and if you're doing a particular SELECT you need to stand on one leg, except on Fridays when it's the right leg."
Now compare with the Postgres manual page describing their ACID implementation. It's a couple of pages, keeping things clear and simple, so that anybody can understand them.
Not to forget that if you want InnoDB you give up full text search capabilities. And you ask why we should use Postgres? Really?
MySQL has lowered the bar for complexity of use. But in doing so it has facilitated DB access to a whole bunch of people who don't have any idea what they're doing, or don't really care about data integrity. It's fast and it works most of the time so it's alright, yes? Yes, granted, nobody will care much if your personal blog goes tits up because of MySQL. But I expect people will care if a database in which data actually counts for something has problems. And in such cases I expect people will want a real database.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Slony-I is a dreadful hack that misuses triggers, and doesn't scale past a few nodes.
I'm sorry, but Slony-I is not a serious replication solution.
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