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

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: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: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: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.