Re: Oracle comparison

From: Andrew Mobbs <andrewm_at_chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Date: 19 Jun 2002 12:52:08 +0100 (BST)
Message-ID: <Czx*AWbrp@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>

Generic Poster <nospam_at_nospam.com> wrote:
>
>Well, let's just say that MySQL is being used by a lot of
>Unix/Linx/Apache techhead types, and, as a small db, they seem to be
>enthusiastic about it. These are people who know IT very well, I
>respect their opinions, and I don't think they suffer trash SW lightly.
>But the opinion of the average Word user, I value very little. A couple
>of my employees designed solutions with MySQL (rather small) and it all
>went just fine. I can't think of any other way to make an initial
>decision about a product.....we did a lot of web research on MySQL and
>did not find a lot of "MySQL sucks!" stuff. We went to the techie
>newsgroups and asked around. It's hard to figure out if SW is any good
>or not.......

MySQL fails to win many friends amongst Oracle DBAs because there are so many missing features that we sit here and wonder how anybody could possibly use it.

Look at the wishlists for things that the developers want to add to MySQL gives just a few of these (I just flicked through the list at www.mysql.com - I may have missed some):

* Subqueries 
* Stored procedures. Triggers are also being looked at.  
* Full foreign key support
* Online backup 
* Add true VARCHAR support 
* Atomic multi-table updates 
* Simple views (first on one table, later on any expression).  
* A simple (atomic) update language that can be used to write loops and such in

the MySQL server.

Ask an Oracle DBA or developer to live without that lot, and the other features MySQL lacks, and they'd look at you like you were proposing to start building a house, and all you had was a flint axe and a tree.

Many of the earlier complaints about MySQL (such as a lack of ACID compliant transactions, and lack of row-level locking) have been resolved, and I'm sure the above will be resolved eventually.

-- 
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/

Received on Wed Jun 19 2002 - 06:52:08 CDT