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Ask Slashdot: Which OSS Database Project To Help?
DoofusOfDeath writes "I've done a good bit of SQL development / tuning in the past. After being away from the database world for a while to finish grad school, I'm about ready to get back in the game. I want to start contributing to some OSS database project, both for fun and perhaps to help my employment prospects in western Europe. My problem is choosing which OSS DB to help with. MySQL is the most popular, so getting involved with it would be most helpful to my employment prospects. But its list of fundamental design flaws (video) seems so severe that I can't respect it as a database. I'm attracted to the robust correctness requirements of PostgreSQL, but there don't seem to be many prospective employers using it. So while I'd enjoy working on it, I don't think it would be very helpful to my employment prospects. Any suggestions?"
It's seeing a constant rise in usage. Also many projects (spacewalk!) have it as the only viable alternative to Oracle.
Small companies with small to mid sized applications use it (see Jira or Fisheye, at Atlassian) as their main development platform.
Also you shouldn't use your USA'ish perspective and only do something because it will benefit your job or future employer. OSS is about sharing, fun, knowlege and getting better. Getting better at your job is a welcome side effect.
https://kb.askmonty.org/en/community-contributing-to-the-mariadb-project/
We (yes, I work for the project) are always looking for new contributors. There are lots of exciting things happening right now.
+1
You don't see lots of people saying they use PostgreSQL online, because, no one has to bitch about it. It works, it works great, and its documentation is astounding.
Everyone uses it, you just don't realize it, again, because no one bitches about it.
I'll never touch MySQL after having used it for a product, what a POS
Actually I wasn't. I figured the /. crowd might have some knowledge about the relative acceptance and prevalence of the two databases in European business settings, and where things are moving.
For example, if the consensus was that PostgreSQL was so rarely used that it was a dead-end, then I'd suck it up and work on MySQL despite my misgivings.
But as long as PostgreSQL is showing some signs of life in a business setting, I'll perhaps try to pitch in on that.
I also figured that maybe there was some other up-and-coming database out there that I should take a look at. The /. community is good at bringing alternatives like this to light.
As far as flames, I should have been clearer about what I meant by "design flaws". I realize that it's somewhat subjective. What I should have said is that MySQL's behavior strikes me as a lot more surprising in some cases than does PostgreSQL's, and I didn't think that was going to chance. (Probably in a similar vein, I like strongly typed programming languages and compile-time correctness checks. I think it's a mindset kind of thing.)
The post is basically a troll for a video. The video is based on an old list of MySQL 4.x gotchas, many of which were fixed in the 5.x series. Most of them involve things like the semantics of NULL in special cases, truncation of indexed strings with trailing spaces, and similar stuff that an application shouldn't be relying on. There's a comparable list of PostGreSQL gotchas from the same source.
MySQL has political problems, because Oracle owns it and would prefer users buy their commercial products. The future of the free version is uncertain. The problems in the video aren't the ones to worry about.
Pretty much all the test cases from that video fail on MySQL if the sql-mode is set to traditional. MySQL will throw an error when data would be truncated, throws an error when you try to insert a NULL value in a NOT NULL column, refuses to alter a table if the existing data would be truncated, throws an error on an invalid date, on select only returns a warning for division by 0 but throws an error on an insert of division by 0, throws an error if you try to insert a string into a numeric column and so on.
I understand of course that the strict modes aren't enabled by default but they're easy enough to enable if you choose to. Via my.cnf, the command line when mysqld is started up or while connected to the mysql server itself (for just that session, or globally for all sessions).
I didn't run through all their examples, but mostly because I got bored and all their examples that I did try were throwing errors (except the select 1/0 one, which issued a warning) with the sql-mode set to traditional on MySQL (postgresql is also a sql-mode option but I didn't play with that one since I've never used it before).
If only they were actually edge cases(look carefully they mentioned one was a common Ruby on Rails mistake). MySQL's habit of pretending everything is alright when it's not has burned more than one of my previous employers.
But they missed the real WTFs like mysqldump creating dumps that need to be hand edited before MySQL will restore them or my all time favorite: mysql user authentication simply does a "SELECT * from mysql.users" and if the fields get reordered by a new MySQL release then logins will simply fail. The best part is that the officially documented way to fix that is a mysqldump followed by a restore which... deletes the table and puts the fields in the wrong order again. The last major MySQL upgrade of my employer's systems involved me starting the new install from an empty DB, restoring everything except the mysql.users table and recreating the accounts using a script.
Please don't pretend it's not a crap database. Those of us who have to deal with it every day know better.