MySQL RANT

[markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org (markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org)]

> On 6/8/07, markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org <markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>>
>> In a professional environment, if you ignore the body of knowledge and
>> theory about the tool-set to your solution, I maintain you should be
>> fired.
>>
>> Even further, without a very specific reason, the choice of using MySQL
>> shows a complete lack of understanding about SQL databases, and that may
>> pass these days for beginners, but not for competent software engineers.
>>
>
> For those of us less enlightened, could you share the key features, or
> lack of them, that make MySQL a fire-able offense?

That is sort of the problem, there are plenty of good books on the
subject. My one little post can't possibly cover the subject at all. Its
frustrating, because none of this stuff is a secret and is part of what
most would call "computer science" and engineers go on in complete
ignorance.

Similarly, if a computer science grad said "For those of us less
enlightened, could you share the benefits of using a tree or hash table
over a standard array?" What would you say?

For starters, read up on multi-version concurrency, ACID, query planners,
and join strategies. These are the basics of what makes a good database a
good database, and MySQL does little of it, and what it does do, it does
poorly. That's just the correctness rant.

Then lets go on to the implementation. Have you ever tried to drop an
index on a LARGE mysql table? Good luck. MySQL is built from a stupid
little query interface over simple tables. It is quite literally the
Windows of databases.

MySQL doesn't even do the simple stuff well enough on a single system. It
doesn't support or plan SQL very well, so you end up writing your SQL
around MySQL idiocy.

>
> And of the other choices a client might enquire about: MS SQL Server,
> Oracle, Ingres, PostgreSQL, Access, FoxPro, dBASE, FIrebird,
> SQLite,... are there others you'd put in the same category?

I'm a PostgreSQL fan, although, DB2, Oracle, and Sybase are very good.
FoxPro, dBase, and XBase type systems are all fairly simple and relatively
similar.


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