MySQL Outpacing Oracle In Wake of Acquisition

snydeq writes "Results from the 2010 Eclipse User Survey reveal interesting trends surrounding open source usage and opinions, writes InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues. Linux usage among developers is on the rise, at the expense of Windows, and MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle, by a factor of 3-to-2, as the database of choice among Eclipse developers. 'The data demonstrate that fears surrounding Oracle's control over MySQL have not resulted in lower use of MySQL in favor of an alternative open source database,' Rodrigues writes."

Comments

Nice to them

[WetCat]

I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.

Re:Nice to them

[1s44c]

I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.

I like Oracles's database, it's a great database with tons of features but it's pretty expensive. However the business software that oracle sells is a PITA.

Re:Nice to them

[The Snowman]

I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.

I like Oracle too, as long as someone else is the DBA. Installing Oracle, setting up a database, and getting it to a usable state is almost impossible without six months of training.

PostgreSQL, MySQL, even SQL Server are all much easier to get up and running in a usable configuration than Oracle. I don't mean slightly easier, either. If other databases are like putting a band-aid on a cut, Oracle is like brain surgery.

Re:Nice to them

[Anrego]

I don't mean slightly easier, either. If other databases are like putting a band-aid on a cut, Oracle is like brain surgery.

Totally.

I almost think oracle does this on purpose to drum up consulting fees or something. For such a powerful database product, all the tools around it are almost intentionally unintuitive and fragile.

Even connecting to oracle, arguably the simplest interaction with most databases, is more complicated. Most databases you just specify a hostname, username, and password.. oracle seems to insist on all manner of weird voodoo. Once you know that voodoo it's no problem.. but initially it's like "service name" .. wtf is that.. and what do you mean I have to add this to some config file!

Re:Nice to them

[Anonymous Coward]

I know what you're saying, but at the same time I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

Completely anecdotal, but in my experience Oracle is more likely to be installed and configured "correctly" than the other databases. I think that's in large part because it's usually done by a professional DBA. That usually trickles down all the way to stuff like the table design and consistency constraints.

Re:Nice to them

[NNKK]

If every production database required an arrogant and overpriced Oracle shill to maintain it, nothing would ever get done.

Re:Nice to them

[mcvos]

I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.

I like Oracle too, as long as someone else is the DBA. Installing Oracle, setting up a database, and getting it to a usable state is almost impossible without six months of training.

On every project where we've used Oracle, we ran into problems with it. Quite often, somewhere early in development, we used MySQL or something like that. At some point we move to production-like environment with Oracle, and it should be a simple matter of plugging in a different DB, but every single time, we suddenly find ourselves in a big mess where types don't quite fit or column names are too long or illegal or whatever.

Oracle might be really nice if it was just more powerful, rather than more restrictive.

Re:Nice to them

[jazzkat]

This is because you're using MySQL to develop on. MySQL allows all manner of illegal hostnames and other bad programming practices in the name of "making things easier" for people who don't know any better.

If you developed using Postgres, or another more compliant database, most of these problems would go away.

Re:Nice to them

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Java is a pretty cool guy. eh makes databaeses and doesnt afraid of anything.

Re:Nice to them

[blai]

MySQL allows all manner of illegal hostnames and other bad programming practices in the name of "making things easier" for people who don't know any better

I am not into databases, so that just sounds like fault tolerance to me. What's wrong with that?

Re:Nice to them

[MBGMorden]

Indeed. At work, we have an absolute "No Oracle" policy. In reality it's a "SQL Server ONLY" policy, but I've managed to convince them to let me use Postgres on some smaller in-house projects.

Simple reason (and they're right) is that the department would pretty much HAVE to hire an experienced Oracle administrator to keep those things running. On the other hand, for SQL Server and most other DB's, any developer who's worked with them at least a little can setup the servers. When we started doing a lot of SQL Server deployments within the organization we took one of our developers who had some experience writing apps that use SQL server, and sent them to a 3 week SQL Server Admin bootcamp course. Total cost there was less than $5,000. They got a position change, and a small raise, but overall we have saved a ton of money going that route, and our databases have been humming along for a few years now with no serious issues.

Re:Nice to them

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure why I typed 'hostnames' here. But MySQL allows all kinds of bad programming practices (for example, inserting text strings into numeric fields) and either fails silently (inserting garbage data into your table) or does what it thinks you want it to do.

Other databases, such as Postgres and Oracle, generate errors and refuse to do anything when they encounter these problems - they don't fail silently.

Combined with the fact that MySQL allows non-standard syntax and non-standard operations, the end effect is that if you develop against MySQL and use all of the "idiot features" it's very difficult to port to a real DBMS such as Postgres or Oracle.

Re:Nice to them

[turing_m]

I am not into databases, so that just sounds like fault tolerance to me. What's wrong with that?

I can't comment on the illegal hostname bit. However, the general idea behind databases is that your data is extremely important. Enter the data in once, use it in any possible way you want, often in ways you had not anticipated at the time of design. The data should be as constrained as possible at the point of entry to ensure that it is consistent and correct - this is an infinitely better time to rectify errors than say, several years after the fact when you are performing operations on the data and the original records may be lost, or the employees are missing or have forgotten the information. From that perspective, if there is ambiguity or error in what you are trying to tell the database to do with the data, it MUST fail (with a helpful error message) rather than guess what you are trying to do in the name of "fault tolerance".

Re:Nice to them

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle might be really nice if it was just more powerful, rather than more restrictive.

It is not the lack of power that is the problem, it is the lack of knowledge that makes your developers assume that everything behaves like MySQL. These "restrictive" check are there for a reason, mostly to ensure the integrity of your data.

If your data isn't that important, maybe it is fine with you. But on the other hand, why are you using a RDBMS if the data isn't important?

Re:Nice to them

[TheRaven64]

Most of the time, people use a database because they care about their data. That's really the point of a database - to provide a persistent store for a load of data that is as difficult as possible to accidentally break. Ideally it should be fast as well, and allow you to access the data in complex ways.

A number of rules in SQL are quite pedantic for precisely this reason. If you enter something invalid then the database could guess what you meant, and might even be right 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, it would be silently corrupting or destroying parts of your database, or maybe just discarding part of the data that you thought was persistently stored.

MySQL deviates from standard SQL in a number of ways, allowing things that are wrong to do something. Exactly what 'something' is depends on the version of MySQL that you are using.

Basically, using MySQL is like running with a load of error checking disabled. Sure, it's irritating that your code compiled with a load of assert() statements keeps breaking with an assert failure, but generally it's better to see the error and fix it than to deploy a production system after just commenting out the assert() line.

Re:Nice to them

[shaitand]

Yeah, of course you could have accomplished the same thing with a tech savy high school grad who plays with the web for $10/hr and without the boot camp.

Re:Nice to them

[bruce_the_loon]

It's a attempt at simplicity. Change one place, and one place only, on an entire application server and you switch from old DB server to new DB server. Cross-application, cross-language, all are changed instantly.

Even if an app is using a centralized configuration point, if you are running multiple small applications on the same server, it helps with keeping things straight.

Re:Nice to them

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.

I like Oracle too, as long as someone else is the DBA. Installing Oracle, setting up a database, and getting it to a usable state is almost impossible without six months of training.

On every project where we've used Oracle, we ran into problems with it. Quite often, somewhere early in development, we used MySQL or something like that. At some point we move to production-like environment with Oracle, and it should be a simple matter of plugging in a different DB, but every single time, we suddenly find ourselves in a big mess where types don't quite fit or column names are too long or illegal or whatever.

Oracle might be really nice if it was just more powerful, rather than more restrictive.

Well what do you expect if you use junk like MySQL that is totally non-standard?

Oh, bruther

[hey!]

What a non-story.

You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.

Saying MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle is like saying that claw hammers have pulled ahead of pneumatic hammers mounted on giant excavators.

Re:Oh, bruther

[drinkypoo]

You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.

Similar things have been said about MySQL. It's a de facto standard, which many view as being quite unfortunate in light of the competition.

Saying MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle is like saying that claw hammers have pulled ahead of pneumatic hammers mounted on giant excavators.

Since MySQL got clustering it became capable of replacing Oracle in certain contexts. I don't have a tool-related metaphor handy but there are actually cases in which the comparison might not be so ridiculous.

Re:Oh, bruther

[mjwalshe]

and "database of choice among Eclipse developers." Oracle developers will be using TOAD or enterprise mangler (or what ever oracle is calling it now) if they are unlucky - dubious use of statistics there

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase 'database of choice among Eclipse developers' made me raise an eyebrow too. But the rest of your comment, WTF? MySQL is an RDBMS. Oracle is an RDBMS. Toad is a database development tool. Enterprise Manager is a database management tool. You are talking apples and bananas to oranges. Huh?

Re:Oh, bruther

[buchner.johannes]

I disagree. Oracle makes a pretty good and fast database. They also offer a free version for OSS and small companies I believe.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle is like saying that claw hammers have pulled ahead of pneumatic hammers mounted on giant excavators.

It sounds like the point is MySQL is growing faster than their main product, thus indicating devs aren't fleeing? Didn't RTFA though :) Personally I dropped MySQL for Postgres when I discovered MySQL couldn't do deferred foreign key constraints. No circular relationships makes me a saaaaad panda.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Kjella]

You use Oracle because you *have to*. Not because it is pretty.

Oracle is past that and way into user-unfriendly in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, if you write queries that are exactly how Oracle likes them it's fast and solid, but I've worked with SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL as well and the management tools are easier, the query optimizer is more flexible and the error messages more helpful. Particularly that Oracle wants queries their way, I've reused queries that run in seconds on SQL Server and take minutes on Oracle but hardly if ever the other way around. It can always be fixed by tweaking the query but it seems Oracle needs 10x as much tweaking as any other database. It makes Oracle DBA/devs their own little ivory tower and I'd love to see it come crumbling down, because they're floating on their own bubble of "nobody would dare run their ultra-critical systems on anything but Oracle".

Re:Oh, bruther

[14erCleaner]

Furthermore, this is a survey of Eclipse users, not all database users. Developers using a free framework prefer a free database. Surprise!

Re:Oh, bruther

[Score Whore]

Don't get me wrong, if you write queries that are exactly how Oracle likes them it's fast and solid, but I've worked with SQL Server, PostgreSQL and MySQL as well and the management tools are easier, the query optimizer is more flexible and the error messages more helpful. Particularly that Oracle wants queries their way, I've reused queries that run in seconds on SQL Server and take minutes on Oracle but hardly if ever the other way around.

Treating the database as a black box is the problem, not the solution. At least if you're dealing with more than trivial amounts of data with trivial queries. It is amazing how many developers are shocked that their app, that worked perfectly on their desktop against their own personally installed database with, gosh, nearly two megabytes of data, completely falls over when deployed into against the eight terabyte production database.

In other words, a database isn't a replacement for thinking.

Re:Oh, bruther

[NNKK]

Treating the database as a black box is the problem, not the solution.

Then the database is broken.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Treating the database as a black box is the problem, not the solution.

Then the database is broken.

You, sir, are a clown.

Re:Oh, bruther

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

fucking eh to that!

I will NEVER understand where DBA's get off saying: "I poorly designed my database, so you have to use what I know to use it"

it frustrates the hell out of me that people REFUSE to change the way they approach situations. there's NEVER a situation that only has one solution.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be stupid. If the developer does a "SELECT * FROM TABLE_X" and it works fine on his 2MB database, you really think that'll be ok with a 2TB database? Or even a 2GB database?

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Treating the database as a black box is the problem, not the solution.

Then the database is broken.

No, the database management system is not broken - the developers stopped thinking. Different implementation choices give rise to different behaviours. For instance, Oracles default with snapshot transaction isolation, mostly non-blocking reads and writes, as well as almost "no-cost" locking is quite different from SQL Servers read-commited transaction isolation level where readers block writers and vice versa (and resource expensive locks). In other words, running the same queries against the "same" database will give different results in the different database management systems. Oracle is arguably closer to the ideal but if you don't need to handle lots of concurrent transactions then SQL Server may have less overhead. The choice is yours but make that an informed decision and learn about the system you are using!

(rant mode)
In my 10+ years as a professional DBA I have found that the worst "abusers" of database management systems are (non-database) developers who stop thinking at their database access layer - or even before that. Persistence layers are bad but at least they shield the database management system from the worst abuse produced by developers.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Kjella]

Well doh, that would be comparing blueberries to watermelons. But I've been been working with a product that supports both SQL Server and Oracle so production databases of about equal size, equal hardware and equal content. I develop queries to show something at one client site, then reuse it at a different client site with a different database system. In short, two equally smart database systems should perform about the same. What I'm saying is that in my experience Oracle often generates very poor execution plans, and fiddling with it to make Oracle do it "right" that others manage just fine on their own is not treating it as a black box, it's tedious and unnecessary micromanagement to overcome product shortcomings.

Re:Oh, bruther

[NNKK]

You've pretty much proved the point. A developer wants a tool that works. A "professional DBA" wants to lecture the developer on why what he's doing is theoretically impure.

In 4+ years of dealing with professional DBAs, I've never once met one that got anything done, and twice I've directly witnessed companies move away from Oracle specifically because the developers did a better job of accomplishing business goals with MySQL than the "professionals" did with Oracle.

Re:Oh, bruther

[NNKK]

Don't be stupid. If the developer does a "SELECT * FROM TABLE_X" and it works fine on his 2MB database, you really think that'll be ok with a 2TB database? Or even a 2GB database?

Strawman and you know it. That would apply to any datastore, even a filesystem, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the asinine behavior of certain overpriced RDBMS products when the developer clearly asks for a specific subset of the data.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Saying MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle is like saying that claw hammers have pulled ahead of pneumatic hammers mounted on giant excavators.

You sure about that?

flat files are like claw hammers
mysql is like a hand held pneumatic hammer
mysqli cluster is like an army of workers with hand held pneumatic hammers
Oracle is like an army of union works with hand help pneumatic hammers

Given the above one can conclude that MySQL pulling ahead of Oracle is like saying union works have fallen behind non-union workers.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

For what a lot of people use databases for (backing store for form entry) it really doesn't matter because you only use generic capabilities and work mostly in your IDE.

When it gets to really challenging database problems, it's a question of which fail comes first: the failure of the developer or admin using Oracle or the failure of MySQL to keep up with the application's needs. For example, if you need just a bit more performance, with MySQL your response is simple: get bigger iron. If it's not worth the price, you live with it. With Oracle you start looking into the manuals and contemplating playing with things only an expert Oracle DBA ought to mess with. Then if you get it wrong, it's *your* fail.

I think Oracle's a great product. If I was looking at a project where I had to choose between SQL Server and Oracle, I'd definitely go Oracle even if I had to pay twice the license fee. Oracle's transaction log management capabilities would be worth the price alone. Nobody does transaction isolation better than Oracle, either. But ye gods you can screw yourself messing around on one hand, or not paying enough attention on the other.

I've used both MySQL and Oracle, and I'm comfortable with Oracle, except I don't much like the company or its corporate culture (not that that matters if the question is MySQL vs. Oracle). I might be more comfortable handing off a MySQL project to another developer or manager.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

In certain contexts, granted. And where you have such a context, by all means go for it if you like MySQL and are comfortable with it. I haven't used MySQL Cluster, but what I've read about it makes it seem pretty nifty. But I've also seen situations where MySQL even with clustering wouldn't work, particularly as transactions scale in complexity, not just volume.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

MS SQL does a pretty good job optimizing common queries, but at a tremendous cost in orthogonality of T-SQL. I've also found limitations in MS SQL handling of very complex queries, but there is no question that on the kinds of queries that dominate in the vast majority of applications, MS SQL provides reliably good performance out of the box.

That's an engineering trade-off that works for lots of people.

That said, you're going about this the wrong way. The solution to generally inconsistent query performance is database administration, not tweaking. That's "user unfriendly" because it's a job for a DBA, not a user. Oracle gives you much, much more access to the innards of the system, and its stuff that even most tech savvy developers aren't really competent to play with.

Oracle should give comparable performance to MS SQL in most instances without tweaking. Certainly you shouldn't be seeing a difference of 10x in performance that you have to correct by tweaking. My guess is something is really really screwed up on the Oracle installation you were working with.

Finally you also have to evaluate the performance of the query under production conditions, not developer conditions: many large tables simultaneously handling heavy update loads with lots of concurrency issues. The results you are talking about are so screwy, though, it's clear that you've got a really mis-configured system.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

In short, two equally smart database systems should perform about the same.

Bingo. Ergo, something is wrong with your Oracle installations.

I've done the same, supported an application that is available for MS SQL, Oracle and Sybase Sql Anywhere. MS SQL and Oracle blow SQL Anywhere out of the water in performance, but in most situations you couldn't tell the difference.

From a developer's POV, SQL Anywhere was in most cases a pleasure to work with, Oracle was acceptable in most cases and outstanding in a few, and MS SQL was a horrible PITA. MS SQL doesn't even provide you with a utility to get a human readable dump of the transaction log, much less any way to use the transaction log in a complex recovery (unless you fancy working with page addresses). When a customer does something really stupid, and calls you up saying, "please, please make it like that never happened," it's as easy as rolling off a log in Oracle, practical in SQL Anywhere and not worth doing in MS SQL.

Re:Oh, bruther

[ducomputergeek]

Have you ever used MySQL's clustering? I'm not talking about replication, but their NDBCluster engine. Every time it's been considered around me, MySQL AB and then SUN basically said outright that we'd need to purchase enterprise support packages. Well when we got adding up those support and optimization costs it got high enough that it begged the question, why not spend an extra 10% and go with IBM DB2.

Re:Oh, bruther

[lakeland]

I didn't. I got burned too often by small projects having to be changed because of licencing issues.

(rant starting)
For instance I had a 'team' (of 2) doing advanced analytics that were hammering the data warehouse. It was proposed to use RAC and have them access another machine - for the cost of RAC I could buy a whole team to write custom replication code! Then it was proposed to replicate using some simple ETL code to another database, canned due to the cost of another production Oracle licence just to satisfy two users. In the end this is pretty much what I went with, except that the destination machine was running SAS because it's cheaper and the advanced analytic users prefer it.

Same company, different project... the data warehouse was being asked by the business to perform a number of fixes to raw source data that had the DW manager cringing. He proposed splitting the DW into a proper DW and put another machine in between operations and the DW which performed these fixes. The project had to be canned because we couldn't justify the extra Oracle licences just for process purity.

The conclusion I took from this is that Oracle may be better than MS SQL or Postgres and it may be better in ways that justify the extra cost (locking becomes almost a non-issue, etc.) but if you go with Oracle then you'll end up preventing all those cool little improvements that your staff think of over the years and I'm not willing to wear that level of inflexibility.

So the last time I had to make this call I went with MS SQL. Yes I've had issues that I wouldn't have had with Oracle, and I got a lot of flack from the Oracle sales rep about the call, but overall it's performed pretty well. One of the things the rep pointed out was that Oracle standard edition was cheaper than MS standard and contained support for RAC (which would've been nice) but I kept remembering how many Oracle things are only in EE and imagining the licencing costs in say five years time when my successor finds they have no choice except to migrate to EE and looks at the use of RAC I've made. I don't want to hobble the future flexibility of companies I work for like that.

There's quite a few things that MS does better than Oracle too, just they tend to not in the core DB engine. Reporting services is pretty slick, Integration Services versus OWB..., Management Studio is not bad either, MS SQL's spatial might be less featureful than Oracle Spatial but it's ten times easier to code for, and MS SQL's integration with CLR makes up for much of PL/SQL's superiority over T-SQL (which sucks).

Next time I hope to try Postgres, since an annoying side effect of choosing MS SQL is the server has to run Windows, but we'll see. Unless I can be very sure the system architecture won't change, Oracle will be about as likely to be chosen as MySQL - basically no unless my staff only have experience with it. Postgres' support for embedded languages is better than Oracle's too...

Re:Oh, bruther

[drinkypoo]

Every time it's been considered around me, MySQL AB and then SUN basically said outright that we'd need to purchase enterprise support packages.

Seems to me like it's one of those "if you have to ask" situations. How much will a shitload of Oracle licenses cost you? How many developer man-hours would a MySQL-based solution cost you? How competent is your company at hiring technical employees if it doesn't have the talent onboard already? Etc.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

Well, one thing I don't like about Oracle is its rapaciously sales-oriented corporate culture. Of course business is all about making sales, but Oracle really doesn't care of you bought the wrong thing or spent 10x what you needed to. They don't care if you buy the wrong class of license and have to throw it away because it doesn't work for you. I've seen cases where organizations have paid huge amounts of money to get Oracle Enterprise where they only intended to use features in Oracle Standard at a tiny fraction of the price. I've seen customers buy per seat licenses, not being informed that that requires a CAL for every computer or device (e.g. phone) that uses Oracle hosted data, then have to pay through the nose for CALs or throw out their CALs and buy a per processor license.

Oracle really doesn't care if you buy something from them that will make you really really mad at them a few months down the line, so long as they have your signature on the dotted line and your money in the bank.

That's not the way customers should be treated. Not if you want them to be loyal.

I'm talking rather of Oracle's technical merits, which are considerable, and in many cases unique. But if you can get away with not using a product's unique abilities, your way better off if you have to port away from it in the future. The same goes for MySQL, which has unique aspects that are not features, per se, but idiosyncrasies. Both Oracle and MySQL are not easy products to port away from, unless you're using really, really common denominator features through some kind of abstraction layer like Hibernate.

Re:Oh, bruther

[bertok]

Thank you! I thought it was just me!

I did the same test a couple of years ago. I was writing an app for a huge data set, but I was told to do the proof-of-concept on both Oracle and SQL Server. I used two identical servers, identical SAN volumes, etc...

The result was shocking. Oracle is at least 5x as slow as SQL Server. It seems to pick acceptable query plans, but for some reason it's just... slower.

One possible explanation that occurred to me is that SQL Server clusters all data by default, whereas that's an optional 'feature' in Oracle. If you try to cluster data in Oracle, it can break other functionality, so it's not the default and developers can't always just turn it on.

Inserting bulk text seems to be awfully slow for some reason as well, and I couldn't figure it out. I saw forum posts along the lines of "well of course it's slow, you're working with text". Meanwhile, SQL Server was doing the exact same thing 50x faster.

Now I don't wonder any more why the Oracle EULA prohibits benchmarking.

Try googling for "Oracle Benchmark". You'll be lucky to find 2 or 3 on the entire internet that compare it to something else, and weren't done by Oracle themselves.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Zontar The Mindless]

If you don't want to pay for the NDB software, you can get the OSS/GPL version.

If you want support for the NDB software, you're going to have to pay *somebody* for it, even if that somebody is just someone on your own payroll reading the Cluster mailing list/forum/blogs/docs and learning things the hard way.

Does the "10% extra" for DB2 include support?

Re:Oh, bruther

[shaitand]

If you NEED clustering you are talking about an enterprise scale implementation. If you are talking about an enterprise scale implementation and it isn't going to make you enough to justify enterprise level support... you might need to reconsider whatever led you down this path.

I work in enterprise tech and I find it annoying how much the entry level products cost or that some of them don't work without a current support contract. But the only reason that is annoying is that I'd like a small ex switch running (the latest) junos or an f5 ltm/gtm virtual machine (again with latest os) in my home lab rack.

Anywhere these products actually NEED to be deployed for production the cost of the gear/support is a minor blip on the budget compared to the cost of them ever going down in a way that impacts production.

Re:Oh, bruther

[shaitand]

P.S. it is also possible you are undervaluing the infrastructure that makes your profits possible. I have seen ignorant companies that think sales have a greater impact on their profit than infrastructure.

The reality of course is that while sales is easy to measure and visible an infrastructure (including tech staff) breakdown will cause the house of cards to collapse just as surely.

Re:Oh, bruther

[shaitand]

ridiculous. that is thinking about scale. It applies equally when treating the database solution as a black box and affect different database products the same way.

Re:Oh, bruther

[drinkypoo]

Has anyone done a good performance:scalability roundup on RDBMSes recently? When I worked for Tivoli, which was years ago now, DB2 was slowest but most scalable, Oracle slightly faster and significantly less scalable, Sybase much less scalable and much faster, and SQL Server (which was based on Sybase 10 at the time; Sybase being on Version 11) was the fastest and by far least scalable. I would be surprised if all this wasn't still true; is it?

The only thing I've personally noticed (the performance tests were done by another group) is that installing Oracle on any platform (and I've installed on several) is a PITA. The one Linux install I did involved workarounds which surely took Oracle as long to publish as it would have a new installer. This smacks of incompetence and any organism or organization which displays incompetence in one front-facing area tends to display it in others.

Re:Oh, bruther

[hey!]

You ain't kiddin' about Oracle installs being a PITA. Not for somebody who does them all the time, but if you support apps you get reminded.

Most RDBMS EULAs forbid publishing benchmarks unless they've been improved by the vendor, so who knows? Your experience pretty much agrees with mine.

Re:Oh, bruther

[bruce_the_loon]

Two things, wonderful Freudian slip unless "improved" was intentional.

Second, the motion for bad installer is carried. Oracle 10g's Windows client installer cannot figure out that if I set my virtual memory to automatic, then I actually do have virtual memory and that it shouldn't fail with a suggestion that I set my virtual memory to bigger than 256MB.

Re:Oh, bruther

[cduffy]

I tend to agree with your decision, having been burned badly by Oracle agreeing to a mutually reasonable licensing arrangement up-front and then deciding to force a change of terms down the road.

My current employer is a Fortune 50, and might have enough clout to avoid that -- but the little startups I used to work for in the past most certainly couldn't.

Anyhow, where I was going -- one of those startups had a fairly positive experience with EnterpriseDB (a commercial product built on top of PostgreSQL -- the initial feature they offered which got our attention was an Oracle compatibility layer); their support staff is top-notch, and though we had a much more ambivalent (if not negative) experience with the folks whey were partnered with at the time for replication, they solicited our feedback at the time and were heavily involved in the new built-in replication in PostgreSQL 9.0. As such, I'd like to think our feedback helped to result in a net win for everyone.

Re:Oh, bruther

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you must be from the OO/Java/NoSQL crowd. Come on in, take a seat, don't mind that they only have three legs instead of four. What's that? What happened to the fourth one? Oh, you know, we thought it was unnecessary, I mean, it's a chair, right? You shouldn't have to think about a chair!

Re:Oh, bruther

[NNKK]

Ah, you must be from the OO/Java/NoSQL crowd. Come on in, take a seat, don't mind that they only have three legs instead of four. What's that? What happened to the fourth one? Oh, you know, we thought it was unnecessary, I mean, it's a chair, right? You shouldn't have to think about a chair!

Remarkably, it's possible for someone to have an opinion without having other opinions you happen to associate with it in your confused little head.

For the record, my most commonly-used programming languages are Python and C, my most common database backend is MySQL, and I can't stand the clusterfuck that is Java.

Hey, look

[Megaweapon]

An InfoWorld submitter submits a non-story about Oracle/MySQL on Slashdot. A Slashvertisement for an advertisement.

Re:Hey, look

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if it is just me, but I have always found the ___World sites to be some of the worst, most slanted, sensationalistic and useless tech news sites around.

And that's tough considering sites like Gizmodo.

Re:Hey, look

[$RANDOMLUSER]

And the InfoWorld story is about the findings from the "2010 Eclipse User Survey", which is a pretty self-selective sample in and of itself: if you're using Eclipse, you're obviously NOT targeting Windows exclusively, you have the OPTION to use Desktop Linux, you have the OPTION to use MySQL, etc.

Re:Hey, look

[Miseph]

I always cringe going to a website with a name that starts with "gizm". Well, not always, but if I'm looking for tech news or whatever, then yeah... especially anything related to iProducts.

Re:Hey, look

[TheRaven64]

Just do what I do and add a line to your CSS to flag InfoWorld links with an [idiot warning]. That way, you won't accidentally click on one and you can come straight to the comments without bothering to read the flawed premise in the article.

But what will Oracle do?

[Voulnet]

Now that MySQL is in the firm hand of Oracle, what can Oracle do in the future to either suppress MySQL's progress or merge it with its money-sucking schemes?

Re:But what will Oracle do?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I have to admit, I LOL'ed when I read:

MySQL has some properties that Oracle does not," Screven said in an interview with InfoWorld before the keynote speech. "It's small, it's easy to install. It's easy for developers to get going with it."

I know I've installed Oracle dozens of times - on the same machine.

What Oracle could do is provide an easy migration path from MySQL to Oracle DB, so one could develop/deploy on MySQL, and move to full Oracle when traffic/size warrants. Just being able to use the same "create table/index/stored procedure" scripts on both databases would be a nice (OK, godsend) feature, using the same DAO objects is probably dreaming on my part.

Re:But what will Oracle do?

[tomhath]

If MySQL meets your needs you wouldn't consider Oracle. If your application is successful enough that you need help scaling out a heavy duty DBMS solution, the guys who are supporting MySQL will be happy to send out a "consultant" to suggest alternatives.

And what do you suppose they will suggest?

Re:But what will Oracle do?

[Voulnet]

Lemme take a wild guess.... MSSQL??

Re:But what will Oracle do?

[Anonymous Coward]

It does -you can migrate from MySQL to Oracle using SQL Developer.

Re:But what will Oracle do?

[TheRaven64]

Now that Oracle owns the MySQL copyright, there's nothing (other than time and effort) stopping them from taking the front end and adding it as a personality layer on top of Oracle, so you could access the same tables via Oracle and MySQL's interfaces. This would make migration much easier for people; move the data into the Oracle DB and then build new stuff on top of Oracle, while the old stuff keeps thinking it's running on MySQL.

actual numbers

[larry bagina]

The write up in the summary is useless. In 2009, MySQL and Oracle usage was 27.7% and 27.3%, respectively. In 2010, it is 31.8% and 21.8%, respectively. This was a community survey of 1696 people (in 2010), 1481 in (2009)

More interesting (to me, at least) -- despite all the talk about how awesome git is, svn usage was more or less unchanged, increasing from 57.5 to 58.3%. Git went from 2.4% to 6.8%.

Re:actual numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

What's surprising about it? git is very good and svn is crap but the eclipse plugings for git are immature compared to those targetting svn, so of course very few eclipse users will use git

Re:actual numbers

[Chibi Merrow]

The Eclipse plugin for SVN is one of the most godawful pieces of crap I've ever seen, though. When we moved from CVS to SVN I couldn't understand why the other developers in our shop were complaining that "Subversion is slow!" when I always found it blazingly fast. They were using the Eclipse plugin, while I was using the command line tools. Yech.

postgres didn't do so badly

[MagicMerlin]

11%...edging out ms sql server! Postgres 9.0 has built in replication -- it will be interesting to see how that affects its share of the open source db space.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[1s44c]

11%...edging out ms sql server! Postgres 9.0 has built in replication -- it will be interesting to see how that affects its share of the open source db space.

Postgres has been in continual development for decades longer than MS SQL server. Postgres is a far better quality product than Microsoft's effort plus it's free.

The only reason to use MS SQL for anything new is if you are getting bribes from a Microsoft salesman.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Anonymous Coward]

PostgreSQL is so much better in so many ways, I can't really understand why so many use MySQL (unless they're using a LAMP app that is heavily tied to MySQL).

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[MagicMerlin]

Postgres has traditionally had lousy replication options. This of course is going to change with 9.0 hs/sr. Older versions of postgres (pre 8.x) had some operational difficulties that made it an awkward fit for high transaction load web environments. Now that those downsides are pretty much eliminated, it's about the best general purpose sql database out there -- it has many niceties/features that are rare/non-existent elsewhere. Transactional ddl for example.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Anonymous Coward]

It didn't have standard replication before. WTF?

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Anonymous Coward]

One other of the "rare" examples of transactional ddl is SQLite.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Billly Gates]

SQL Server is not supported by JDBC unless you use a proprietary driver. Eclipse is strictly a java editing tool at this point even if you can use it for other things (I do not know of anyone who does) and this would explain the low SQL Server usage. I have not programmed in Java for years so maybe my knowledge is outdated.

If you look at VS.NET usage I bet its all 70% SQL Server with Oracle taking 20%. Its all based on the environment.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Billly Gates]

SQL Server does integrate quite well with ADO and .NET environments with Microsoft Ecosystems. Hate it all you want but many I.T. mangers standardized on Microsoft a decade ago and wont consider anything else. If you are stuck in an ms environment and SQL Server is already free with your $$$$ VS.Net licenses then why not use it?

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Anonymous Coward]

"Postgres is a far better quality product than Microsoft's effort plus it's free."

Every run a vacuum on your db and see it halt? How about trying to upgrade or use replication? How about merging 2 postgre databases together?

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[ducomputergeek]

I think what you meant is that PostgreSQL had a number of 3rd party Replication tools that were designed for certain types of usage. Over the years I've used PGCluster I/II, PGPool, SunPlex, and Slony. And a lot of the times, when I saw this happening, the person making the decision was a developer/programmer who often times thought they knew systems and databases. With MySQL, that decision is easy. With PostgreSQL you have to know what your goal is and then which tool is right for that job. Sometimes you may even use a combination of tools for PostgreSQL. Slony is basic Master/Slave Replication (roughly the same as MySQL out of the box), but PGCluster was usually the option that I chose as we were normally looking for High Availability as our primary concern.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[neoform]

Postgres's pain in the ass enumeration handling annoys me greatly.

(What I mean: Once an ENUM has been set in a table, you cannot add/remove/edit fields in it. That really sucks.)

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[1s44c]

SQL Server does integrate quite well with ADO and .NET environments with Microsoft Ecosystems. Hate it all you want but many I.T. mangers standardized on Microsoft a decade ago and wont consider anything else. If you are stuck in an ms environment and SQL Server is already free with your $$$$ VS.Net licenses then why not use it?

From a technical point of view MS SQL has nothing on Postgres or Mysql. It has less than nothing on Oracle. If you are in the position of getting MS SQL free as part of some other deal it still costs the same as better databases, and it still has the security risk that goes with MS software. ( You remember slammer right? )

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Cytotoxic]

From a technical point of view MS SQL has nothing on Postgres or Mysql. It has less than nothing on Oracle. If you are in the position of getting MS SQL free as part of some other deal it still costs the same as better databases, and it still has the security risk that goes with MS software. ( You remember slammer right? )

From a technical point of view you are completely wrong. MS SQL server is every bit the enterprise database - just short of DB2 and Oracle in some very large applications, ahead in other areas. Postgres and MySQL are not in that league in any way. They are great and open, but don't pretend that they are in the same ballpark as the big 3. This is an article about Eclipse developers using -surprise, surprise- open source databases in preference to closed and especially Microsoft. You might as well trumpet the huge advantage that MS SQL server has in .NET development shops. The article is plain silly in that regard - and posts trumpeting MySQL or Postgres over SQL server or Oracle are just ridiculous. For certain environments these are superior choices, but claiming overall technical superiority is just plain ignorant. Microsoft has disadvantages, particularly with respect to cross-platform capability (none), but on the whole it is easier to manage than any of the others and offers features competitive with the largest enterprise databases.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[HTD]

if you need to constantly change an ENUM field, then it is not supposed to be an enum field in the first place... Use a foreign-key to a table which you can easily edit. BTW, you can edit an enum fields definition, it's just a series of clever DDL queries. but again, an enum column isn't supposed to change by design.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[neoform]

It's not a matter of "constantly" changing it, but during development, I've had to add/edit ENUM fields several times, and it's a real pain in the ass to deal with. MySQL has no problem with changing ENUMs. I'm really not sure why Postgres makes such a big deal out of it.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[MobyDisk]

Traditionally, Postgres on Windows has been as a second-tier effort. I think that is changing now that they are supporting 64-bit versions, and with npgsql 2.0. I went to a conference and constantly heard "There's this add-in for postgres, cross-platform, works on anything" and I would raise my hand and ask "What about Windows?" and they would basically say "welll... it works on everything else."

Not faulting those developers. But this is part of why someone might use MS SQL server.

Re:postgres didn't do so badly

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the JTDS JDBC driver?

Fears

[Voulnet]

The 'fears' surrounding Oracle's acquisition of MySQL hadn't stopped people from using it because let's be honest; most developers don't know about that/don't know the consequences/aren't familiar with other free databases. The developers, much like the users they like to call 'lusers'; also look for convenience and try to work in what they're familiar with. That's why many developers who know very well Microsoft's ways still use their technologies; it's what they're used to and change takes time and adaptation efforts. The past few months since the acquisition have been filled with news about Apple, Apple, Google, Apple vs Amazon, Apple vs Adobe, Microsoft, Apple vs Google... It's no wonder many developers don't even KNOW about Oracle acquiring Sun.

Re:Fears

[mustafap]

>most developers don't know about that/don't know the consequences/aren't familiar with other free databases

Really? That's rather disingenuous. I know plenty of Java developers ( the type who are in between McDonalds jobs ) who are familiar with MySQL.

Re:Fears

[Voulnet]

Dude, I meant many developers don't know about Oracle's acquisition of MySQL; not that developers don't know about MySQL. Come on, now.

Re:Fears

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh he must be a java developer. Don't forgive him ;).

Re:Fears

[mustafap]

So you should have written

"many developers don't know about Oracle's acquisition of MySQL"

rather than

"most developers don't know about that/don't know the consequences/aren't familiar with other free databases"

Apologies that I cannot read your mind.

Re:Fears

[Voulnet]

The sentence is crystal clear: "The 'fears' surrounding Oracle's acquisition of MySQL hadn't stopped people from using it because let's be honest; most developers don't know about that" It takes guts to admit you're wrong. You have none.

Maybe this is why?

[AnonymousClown]

Usage of Windows by developers declined from 64.3 percent in 2009 to 58.3 percent in 2010. The decline of Windows is mirrored by a nearly equivalent growth in Linux usage on developer desktops

Look at the price of Visual Studio 2010 Professional (you need that to redistribute your stuff*).$549!! Whereas to develop for Linux is free.

F/OSS dev tools on Windows just don't work well (there was so much shit that wouldn't work together well that I gave up) ; granted I haven't tried again since 2008 and maybe things are better. And even then, you're basically stuck with Win32 C/C++ applications or Java. No thank you, I'm over writing mindless UI boiler plate code - thank-you-very-much.

* - The Visual Studio Express editions don't allow you to redistribute very easily. Yeah, I tried installing the some of the runtimes and other things that it requires but I've never gotten an app I've written to work on another machine.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[walshy007]

* - The Visual Studio Express editions don't allow you to redistribute very easily. Yeah, I tried installing the some of the runtimes and other things that it requires but I've never gotten an app I've written to work on another machine.

I managed to do that in 2005 with express visual c/c++ when playing with quake3 code to give modified engines to friends etc. Wasn't too much trouble so probably just something minor wrong

F/OSS dev tools on Windows just don't work well (there was so much shit that wouldn't work together well that I gave up) ;

It works well but I readily admit it can be an absolute pain in the ass to setup, again this was some time ago, perhaps 2004'ish, since 2006 was the last time I dual booted to windows for playing around.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[mustafap]

>Usage of Windows by developers declined from 64.3 percent in 2009 to 58.3 percent in 2010 we have to take this with a pinch of salt - it was a survey of Eclipse users. That's like surveying alcoholics on whether they drink beer or not.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[Anonymous Coward]

* - The Visual Studio Express editions don't allow you to redistribute very easily. Yeah, I tried installing the some of the runtimes and other things that it requires but I've never gotten an app I've written to work on another machine.

Because you're stupid.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[DAldredge]

Don't blame the tools for your inability to use them correctly.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[CastrTroy]

$549 is nothing if you plan on selling your software. Assuming you charged $20 for a copy of your software, you would need to sell only 28 copies to make back the difference you spent on the IDE. That's nothing. You'll spend more on the computer to run it, almost as much on the OS, and more on electricity to power the computer. Most developers will earn $500 in a couple days, many in just 1 day. For hobby development at home, it's expensive. But if you actually are selling software, the cost is almost negligible.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[Shados]

There's no difference between an app made with VS Express and VS Pro. All you need is to install .NET 4.0 on the target machine. Thats it.

You seriously have to be brain dead to fail at that. I probably have over 100 distinct apps of all kind, ranging from windows services to web applications, going by noob command line apps and everything in between, across 15 companies and most continents, and countless customers, with all versions of visual studio (including express and ultimate), and literally: there's no difference unless you have third party dependencies. The apps "Just work"

Re:Maybe this is why?

[gbjbaanb]

The apps "Just work"

except that with .NET 4.0, it uses a different CLR version (the first since .NET became popular), so a lot of apps that were built using .NET 1.1, 2.0 or 3.5 will not work with your app.

The more I use .NET, the more I find its a PITA, there's too many dependancies and funny ways of referencing different dlls. Why they couldn't just use "current directory, GAC, path" for searching, for example, is crazy. When something goes wrong, for a complex piece of software (and that's what I do, multi-million LoC apps) then .NET is more of a nuisance than you could ever believe.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[AnonymousClown]

Don't blame the tools for your inability to use them correctly.

That's bullshit and you know it and it's that attitude that gives IT people a reputation of being immature and arrogant .

When I had those problems I googled quite a bit and you know what? The problems I mentioned are very common; which means that it's a design and implementation problem with all of those development tools.

So, I am blaming the tools for their poor design. You can be as condescending and insulting all you want but it doesn't change the fact that the tools have problems.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[Shados]

.NET 4.0 breaks backward compatibility to some extent, yes. Except thats not what I was replying to. I was replying to a post saying that Visual Studio Professional was required because apps made with Express couldn't easily be deployed and thats bullshit =P

And Fusion works very much the way you described it. GAC -> Current dir in a couple different ways (Path would have been nice i guess). There's only a "lot of different ways" of referencing DLLs at compile times. At runtime it is very, very simple, with the only complexity being versioning.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[Billly Gates]

The issue is .NET assemblies. The ones you create on the express versions will not work on the other ones. I do not think quake3 uses .NET assemblies so it should be portable. There are also no units and many debugging tools.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[TheRaven64]

If the easiest way of using the tool is not the correct way, then the design of the tool should be reevaluated. If you can't use a hammer, it might be your fault, but if the hammer has blades in the handle and can only be correctly used when wearing a certain kind of glove, it's probably the hammer's fault.

Re:Maybe this is why?

[shutdown -p now]

except that with .NET 4.0, it uses a different CLR version (the first since .NET became popular), so a lot of apps that were built using .NET 1.1, 2.0 or 3.5 will not work with your app.

This isn't quite correct.

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by "since .NET became popular", but there have been 3 major CLR versions so far - v1, v2 and v4. So this kind of thing isn't new.

Furthermore, the differences between v1 and v2 were much bigger than between v2 and v4. In fact, so far as I know, the assembly file format didn't change at all between v2 and v4, so any v4 assembly is also a valid v2 assembly (correct me if I'm wrong here). Most certainly, the format is backwards compatible, so a v1 assembly will load and run on v2 or v4, and a v2 assembly will load and run on v4.

What did change in .NET 4 release is the libraries. It doesn't do you much good if bytecode and metadata format is backwards compatible, if said bytecode calls methods which had their semantics changed. For example, a bunch of string methods were changed from locale-sensitive to ordinal comparison by default.

The point, however, is that you're not supposed to be trying to run a binary compiled for, say, v2 on v4. Several .NET versions can be installed side-by-side precisely so that applications can use whatever major version they're been written against. Migration is supposed to be source-level, not binary-level.

There has been an issue there in that only one CLR runtime could be loaded in any given process - so if an application allows plugins written in managed code (and if it loads plugins via COM, then it implicitly does that), whichever version of CLR is loaded first will be used to run all managed code that is later loaded in the same process. This was a major source of bugs for e.g. managed Windows Shell extensions, though not limited to that alone. With .NET 4, this is fixed, though the fix is not retroactive - so you can load v4 alongside v2, or v4 alongside v1, but not v2 alongside v1. Future versions will retain in-process side-by-side, obviously, so when v5 (or whatever it'll be) comes out, you should be able to have v5, v4 and v2 loaded side-by-side.

Why they couldn't just use "current directory, GAC, path" for searching, for example, is crazy.

That's pretty much what it boils down to by default for a plain application and unsigned assemblies, unless you're using a manifest or code to override it, or run on top of a framework which does that for you (such as ASP.NET).

The reason why signed assemblies aren't loaded from current path is security - a current directory may be world-writable, the GAC is not. It's not a particularly strong mechanism, but it serves its role. If you don't care about it, then just don't use signing or GAC (unless you run into another piece of software that requires GAC'd assemblies - such as SharePoint - which I personally hate due to all the hassle of developing that way).

The title is misleading

[jitendraharlalka]

It is definitely great to know that MySQL is doing great even in Oracle's hands and even Linux is growing in Eclipse User Survey. However, the title of the post is totally misleading as it is merely based on Eclipse User survey and that too with merely 1696 users. Nearly 40% of the respondents came merely from Germany and France (The survey believes this shouldn't bias result but we really have no reason to believe their assumption).

Re:The title is misleading

[bgspence]

Any statistic significantly skewed by adding or subtracting 1 to either your numerator or denominator is a statistic too fragile to support a conclusion.

Re:what I learned at Cal Tech

[vegiVamp]

Hmm. I guess Slashdot stores it's comments in CLOBs, then.

Some POed sales guys

[fatray]

"MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle, by a factor of 3-to-2, as the database of choice among Eclipse developers." You can be sure there are some Oracle sales and marketing guys who are livid at this. They see every MySQL user as money out their pocket (because of reduced bonus). These guys usually have a lot of clout with the corporate execs and they are going to be lobbying to reduce the the competition from MySQL. In my company the sr execs will do some dumb stuff (e. g., things that hurt the long term, infavor of the short term) to keep the sales and marketing guys happy. I suspect there are plenty of Oracle sales guys who would like to kill MySQL today, if not sooner.

Re:Some POed sales guys

[nxtw]

I don't think there are many MySQL users that would have even considered talking to an Oracle sales representative.

Re:Some POed sales guys

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Maybe those guys should go to work for the RIAA. One more time: just because someone went with a free alternative does not mean you lost a sale of an overpriced product.

Re:Some POed sales guys

[fatray]

Yes, I think that the Oracle sales to lost to free MySQL is tiny or none at all. What I am saying is the guy the didn't get his bonus this quarter because he was one or two sales short might have a very emotional response when he sees his company giving away a product that competes with what he is trying to sell (regardless of whether MySQL actually competes with his product). I am too fat and lazy to see how Oracle sales have been doing the last couple of years, but I suspect that a lot of the sales reps and their managers are getting a smaller bonus check recently, due to the economy, not competition from free dms.

Re:Some POed sales guys

[RocketRabbit]

This is really it. A garage startup doesn't usually have tens or hundreds of thousands of bucks just to throw at database software in this day and age. Not when databases have become a commodity as free as air. That money will take care of all the other associated costs of the company for many months.

Startups with tons of venture capital will probably throw money at any "tested solution" like Oracle, but full funded startups are rare as hen's teeth these days. An individual like me who is coding iPhone / iPod / Android apps in their spare time, and needs a database somewhere on the net, is not even considering Oracle.

Re:what I learned at Cal Tech

[PouletFou]

Thank you, I finally found out what tldr stands for.

Wow! Talk About a Misleading Headline

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

"MySQL Outpacing Oracle Among Eclipse Developers In Wake of Acquisition"

Of course, that headline isn't particularly newsworthy. As the article cited states "it would be a stretch to say that these results from the 457 respondents represent the overall market".

Postgres

[Anonymous Coward]

11%...edging out ms sql server! Postgres 9.0 has built in replication -- it will be interesting to see how that affects its share of the open source db space.

Year of the Postgres Desktop here we come!

State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

mysql is like riding a bike and takes practically no effort to administrate; and it works well. Tons of people use it and thusly getting a dba with mysql experience is easy. Furthermore the documentation isnt bad and there are plenty of books about to learn how to admin mysql.

I would say postgre is the best database out there in general terms; but postgre documentation is terribad. It's not easy to jump into. Not that popular so hiring a postgre dba will be costly. There is like 2 books for postgre? Nobody anywhere seems to teach it.

MSSql documention is quite plentiful. Tons of books, tons of courses available. Tons of people trained in all the aspects of operating MSSql. Cheaper labour. At the expense you have licensing costs.

Oracle which IMO is better then MSSql; but often those features too which make it better arent used. There is labour there, training is much harder to come by, and it's well documented. God aweful licensing costs; totally not worth it.

Mysql will mostly stay conservative. Postgre will get documentation together, get some training and books out there. This will really boost them. MSSql I think should work on better clustering/multimaster-replication. Oracle needs to drop the high prices, the competition in the market now doesnt allow them to have those prices.

Re:State of the Databases

[FlyingGuy]

You could not be more wrong about:

Oracle needs to drop the high prices, the competition in the market now doesnt allow them to have those prices.

An this is why...

It's called support. One of the major reasons I recommend Oracle to clients who need maximum uptime and downtime is just not an option is because of the world class support Oracle provides. If you are a licensed Oracle site you have support 24/7/365 no matter what time zone or country you happen to be in. If you pick up the phone and say those magic words, "I'm down" the calvary is not just coming over the hill they are at your door. Guess what that kind of support costs a lot of money to provide.

In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.

MySQL is a wonder database that does what it does very well, but would I put it up in a mission critical bit of infrastructure? Not on a bet. Those companies that have, eg: Sales Force and the like have had to hire LOTS of engineers/developers to handle MySQL in big installations and that costs even more.

Postgre has no such level of support either. So when you missions critical DB goes south either you better be able to fix it or you had better have a lot of friends you can wake up in the middle of the night.

Re:State of the Databases

[TheLink]

Would a normal Oracle customer really get better technical support from Oracle than from the postgresql mailing list? So far you often get useful answers directly from the Postgresql development team[1]. For that level of Oracle support I bet you'd have to pay higher than the normal already high prices, or be a big customer.

Some guy to rushing to my door to quickly not be able to fix the problem, is often useful for keeping the bosses at bay, but not so useful from a technical POV. It is an often critically important feature though - being able to spend the company's money to help keep your job ;).

[1] I doubt this scales though e.g. if Postgresql's popularity skyrockets...

Re:State of the Databases

[Anne Thwacks]

One of the major reasons I recommend Oracle to clients who need maximum uptime and downtime is just not an option is because of the world class support Oracle provide

If they really need world class support, then they ought to use db2 - its better than Oracle in every dimension, even if you include Larry Ellison's yacht.

If they just need something that works properly, then Postgresql will solve their problems.

Disclaimer: I have frequently been a victim of Oracle since Oracle 5.

Re:State of the Databases

[Kjella]

In our race to the bottom of the price bucket lots of things have to be cut and guess where they cut first, you guessed it, in support. With Oracle support you do not get script readers in India or the Philippines you get an Oracle engineer on the phone ready to tackle the problem with you until the problem is solved and they will bring in whatever other resources are required.

Well, I don't know if you'll be getting engineer or script readers but I did a little stats on their SUPPORT positions:
Chile: 78
US: 71:
India: 70
Romania: 28
Egypt: 16
China: 11
Rest of world: 47

Looks like Chile is the new India...

Re:State of the Databases

[misterjjones]

MySQL is a wonder database that does what it does very well, but would I put it up in a mission critical bit of infrastructure? Not on a bet. Those companies that have, eg: Sales Force and the like have had to hire LOTS of engineers/developers to handle MySQL in big installations and that costs even more.

Salesforce runs on Oracle....

Re:State of the Databases

[bunyip]

I've had very good support from MySQL as well. This is experience from several years ago, before Sun or Oracle got involved. The nice thing is that you get to choose, if you don't want support then you pay very little - but ther enterprise level support is quite good.

Re:State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually not a big fan of Oracle; in my experience it requires a lot more hands-on intervention to keep it stable and humming along than a comparably sized mysql/innodb setup.

The OP's point about Oracle support though is substantially correct.

If you call oracle, and you are down, you will get somebody who knows what they are talking about on the phone, usually within 10 minutes and they will work the problem with you until it comes back up. Then they'll turn around (with a bit less urgency) and work with you on an RCA as to why it went down in the first place.

This doesn't require you big a massive enterprise customer either; I have less than 10 oracle servers in production right now and we get the same good support now that we got when we had a single server.

Fundamentally, if its 2:00 AM, and your largest client's database went pear shaped during the middle of their working day and you've got to get the database back up, you want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to somebody who knows what they're talking about, not post on a forum or a mailing list or do a google search for other self proclaimed internet "experts" making suggestions.

Re:State of the Databases

[RocketRabbit]

In a lot of organizations it is cheaper to pay for a 24/7/365 MySQL expert from the local community. I know a guy who does just that, signs up businesses, gives them the cell phone number, and is prepared at any time to help them.

He's cheaper than Oracle because he bills by the hour, not by the "support period." If your Oracle DB that you paid out the butt for a support contract on stays up for 3 years without issue, you are out a substantial amount of money, writing checks to Oracle for merely existing. Many small and medium businesses find it difficult to swallow the concept of paying big money for a program, and even bigger money for support, if they never use the dupport!

Re:State of the Databases

[flipperdo]

If you are a licensed Oracle site you have support 24/7/365...

Wrong. An Oracle license gets you squat. If you want support, you'll have to pay a yearly fee that's roughly one fourth of the astronomically high one time license fee.

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/pricelists.html

Re:State of the Databases

[ducomputergeek]

I will further that if you need support with PostgreSQL there is EnterpriseDB and a couple other companies who specialize in PostgreSQL. We've often used PostgreSQL for clients and it works extremely well. Then if they need more, we transition to DB2.

Re:State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

Postgre has no such level of support either. So when you missions critical DB goes south either you better be able to fix it or you had better have a lot of friends you can wake up in the middle of the night.

Yes, "Postgre" doesn't have any support whatsoever... because there's no such system. PostgreSQL, however, has support from EnterpriseDB, 2nd Quadrant, Command Prompt, Frost Consulting, PostgreSQL Experts, Dalibo, Redpill Linpro.... and dozens of others. There's also a highly active and helpful community to turn to too.

Re:State of the Databases

[XCondE]

Postgre has no such level of support either. So when you missions critical DB goes south either you better be able to fix it or you had better have a lot of friends you can wake up in the middle of the night.

There are companies out there doing 24x7 support for Postgres. Fujitsu Australia is one of them

Re:State of the Databases

[lakeland]

You're serious?

I've had a production Oracle database go down due to a bug in Oracle and raised a support ticket. It took Oracle a week to produce a workaround - what kind of environment can afford to have the production database down for a week? I consider Oracle support okay if you're doing development and don't require quick turnaround but pretty much worthless for handling P1 incidents.

Re:State of the Databases

[Anpheus]

If your mission critical infrastructure suddenly stops working, are you seriously suggesting the best answer is to post a message to a mailing list and hope for a prompt response?

Re:State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

In the company I work for, we use MySQL for our mission critical financial services, since ever version 3.x version. No problems so far. Works just fine for it's pourpose, raw performance, simpleness in managing and scaling our hardware.

Support? Ever had a problem in which the community couldn't help or get useful information for tuning like (http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/) or deploying it.

I can't wait to put hands on MariaDB fork!

Re:State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

Disclaimer: I have frequently been a victim of Oracle since Oracle 5.

Considering Oracle is currently at version 11 it's obvious you don't know what you're talking about. Lack of MVCC makes DB2 practically a toy compared to Oracle.

Re:State of the Databases

[turbidostato]

"If your mission critical infrastructure suddenly stops working, are you seriously suggesting the best answer is to post a message to a mailing list and hope for a prompt response?"

I do suggest it's usually no worse than take the phone and hope for a clued answer instead of one from a boiler-plated, menu-based monkey's one -but it's always awfully front-cost cheaper.

Re:State of the Databases

[drsmithy]

In a lot of organizations it is cheaper to pay for a 24/7/365 MySQL expert from the local community. I know a guy who does just that, signs up businesses, gives them the cell phone number, and is prepared at any time to help them.

What does he do if two of them call at the same time ?

Re:State of the Databases

[shaitand]

recommends someone more competent? how much do your db's go down?

Re:State of the Databases

[shaitand]

You waste your money an overpriced corporate IT admin college grad and support contracts. Your admin had information thrust at him rapidfire in school so the school can claim an impressive curriculum, of which every class is worthless without several months of in the trenches experience BEFORE the next class. So he doesn't know a damn thing, except maybe some impressive sounding operational theory that might be useful to troubleshoot some fringe cases.

As a result, your admin makes you pay ridiculous prices so everything is quad redundant, the more visible to management and users a failure, the more redundant it must be. This way he has time to call support and get the answer.

Since you are paying so much for these support contracts and he is incompetent so he will call them about EVERYTHING. Demanding detailed explanations for minor and unimportant glitches with simple workarounds or that caused one device in a redundant pair to have to be rebooted once in two years.

The 'engineer' he calls is just a guy who doesn't have the option of calling anyone else but his co-workers and thus becomes knowledgable. He expends the time and effort to find the answer or wastes the time of real engineers/developers fixing your obscure and unimportant glitch.

Re:State of the Databases

[TheRaven64]

And if you're not happy with them, they have several competitors hoping to take their business. If you're not happy with Oracle, how many other companies are willing to support your Oracle installation? How many of these have the source code access and expertise required to fix bugs that you encounter? Going with a single-vendor solution is a good way of announcing to the world that you don't really like money and you want someone else to relieve you of it.

Re:State of the Databases

[Anonymous Coward]

My personal database of choice is PostgreSQL, so I'm no Oracle fanbot. But "often" getting "useful answers" on a mailing list, while great and all, doesn't compare AT ALL to getting immediate telephone or on-site support. At the large institution where I work, we currently have a main production database of a few hundred gigabytes running on Informix which routinely suffers from various failures and index corruption. Informix support has truly been a load of crap and we currently have a project to move the database over to Oracle. The Oracle DBA we hired to help us with this told me of previous jobs where they were having issues and Oracle had new drivers sent out within hours fixing the problem; in contrast, a JDBC issue we had with Informix caused one of our developers to decompile the Informix JDBC driver, fix a bug, and recompile it so that we weren't constantly suffering downtime.

So PostgreSQL 9 without a support contract would probably be better than Informix (at least in our experience, since at least we wouldn't have to decompile JDBC drivers in order to fix bugs), but having the engineer who wrote the driver in the first place fix these things within hours of the problem being isolated is worth it when uptime is critical. I can't comment on db2, but I haven't been impressed with what IBM has done with Informix, so....

Re:State of the Databases

[FlyingGuy]

That is my point, when you call Oracle support you do not get a "Menu based monkey reading from boiler plate", you get an oracle Engineer that knows your Oracle Software inside and out.

Re:State of the Databases

[FlyingGuy]

Nice try at a refute but that don't work. They are spread across the globe because as long as you will stay on the phone they will keep transferring you to the next support center as the world continues to turn. I know because I have done it, had an Oracle server down hard and started the conversation with a center in Denver and as the clock kept going I got transfered to the next engineer after they were briefed by my current engineer.

Re:State of the Databases

[turbidostato]

"That is my point, when you call Oracle support you do not get a "Menu based monkey reading from boiler plate", you get an oracle Engineer that knows your Oracle Software inside and out."

Maybe...

Once you pay for "premier support". I know that kind of support gives you a warm fuzzy feeling but did you ever considered ROI? I have to admit I never worked for a F-100 but it needs to be a *very* critical system the one that makes Oracle "premier support" a sounded technical decision instead of plain CYA.

Re:State of the Databases

[TheLink]

For normal Oracle users or for those who pay for premier support?

Many vendors hide their knowledgebase behind a paywall (e.g. CheckPoint Software, and Oracle it seems). That's not true for stuff like Postgresql.

I don't regard being able to pay to access a knowledgebase, as a positive feature. Or being able to pay to get support from people who have access to that paywalled knowledgebase. It really isn't better support to be able to talk to someone who is "more experienced" just because mountains of info has been locked up by the Vendor.

With Postgresql I wouldn't have to call support for many things in the first place - I would already know the answer, just from a few search queries!

The problems I'd need help for would be problems that aren't listed already. And often the Vendor is not able to provide an answer till the developers figure it out. And I doubt most developers do 24/7 support - whether they are Oracle, Postgresql or Microsoft developers. It's just bad for the developer's productivity .

FWIW, I'm the sort of guy who has hexedited 3rd party products to provide features that the 3rd party says are only available in a different product, or to fix bugs that the 3rd party is "going to fix soon" (which is often different from soon enough ;) ).

I'm sure many of us on Slashdot have done stuff like this.

So there's no _technical_ reason (but CYA is useful) for us paying to get a "menu based monkey" or even someone who knows how to use Google. I'm sure we know how to use Google, Bing etc.

With the postgresql mailing list support, I can get real "down to the bits and bytes" sort of answers from the developers. And they actually know a lot more about the DB (and often other stuff) than I do.

Re:State of the Databases

[FlyingGuy]

Document this with the case number and the support notes or it didn't happen.

Re:State of the Databases

[lakeland]

A bit hard now as I'm no longer working at that company.

In case it is relevant, I live in New Zealand where Oracle have no 'on the ground' technical staff.

Re:what I learned at Cal Tech

[phyrexianshaw.ca]

tldr doesn't apply to novels. somebody will read it all, and I expect we'll have a book review on oprah this coming week.

Oh really?

[AnonymousClown]

The apps "Just work"

You're saying I can take an .exe compiled with an Express edition and just run it on another machine?

Nope.

I got a shit load of .dll and manifest errors that I could never get to work. And it's not me.

Re:Oh really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not understand how manifest files works just means you're stupid (and the other losers who can't do it right are stupid too) - the fault is not on the product, it's on you.

It's a fucking development environment. Get to understand how the fuck it works before developing with it. Or go back playing with Java.

Re:Oh really?

[Shados]

The thing is again, there's no difference between Express and Pro in that regard. If you're having issues with Express, you WILL have issues with Pro. Its simple to understand why: The compiler and the DLLs aren't even PART of Visual Studio, they come with the .NET framework (yes, the compiler too!) and that doesn't change between editions.

Make an app, compile it, pick all the files in the bin/release or bin/debug directory (by default), put them on the target machine. Just make sure the target machine has .NET 4.0 installed (the full thing. If you use Client Profile only then it adds the step of making sure you're targeting Client Profile in visual studio). Double click on the app. It just works. Thats for .NET

If you're one of the 3 people in the world who will make a Windows-only app in C++ (why the hell?), just add the C++ redistributable. Again, has JACK to do with the version of Visual Studio you're using.

Diff niches

[Tablizer]

Oracle specializes in keeping the "master" corporate data. It is robust and well-tested. MySql specializes in department-specific copies of subsets of the master data for internal or local usage. There may be a middle area where they fight for control, but in general it's a matter of the best tool for the job.

Eclipse + JBoss + MySQL + PHP?

[Doc Ruby]

I've got to add some embedded client components for syncing a MySQL DB data mart to a remote customer's web services XML interface to an existing app that runs in JBoss against MySQL, with a PHP interface (and a Flex/Flash client), code in an SVN repo.

Is there a good website telling me how to get started with Eclipse and the best plugins and configs, installed and configured on an Ubuntu server?

Re:what I learned at Cal Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait for the slashdot review either. "Incoherent, boring, and pointless ramblings from a crackpot with an inflated ego. You will be forgiven for wondering if this was written by a perl script that mashed together a bunch of posts from alt.usenet.kooks. 7/10."

The database isn't a black box.

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

Treating the database as a black box is the problem, not the solution.

Then the database is broken.

No, the database has never been supposed to be a black box. It is a abstraction that divides the data management problem into two parts: the logical and the physical. The logical side, very roughly, is schema definitions and queries. The physical side is physical data arrangement, indexing, data statistics, cost-based optimization, etc. To get good performance of the database, you must be ready to use the tools provided on the physical side.

Right tool for the right job

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got mission critical stuff that you pay insurance for; Oracle or DB2, without exception.

I actually never find a reason to use mysql.. It's less robust than postgresql and if I'm doing a very small project; sqlite is the better choice. sqlite in ramdisk is exceptional. So I never understood why mysql is so popular, I've replaced a lot of mysql boxes to postgres and oracle before; but never the other way around