MySQL RANT

[rlk-FrUbXkNCsVf2fBVCVOL8/A at public.gmane.org (Robert L Krawitz)]

   Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2007 19:35:40 -0400 (EDT)
   From: markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org
   Cc: discuss-mNDKBlG2WHs 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?

That it depends upon what you're trying to do.  An array's great if
you need to iterate over every element and/or randomly access elements
by numerical index, but it's not so great if you need to search it
frequently, or your space is sparse, or what have you.  The question
obviously can't be answered without context, but you're the one who
made the strong statement, so *you* need to back it up.

Suppose I said "Even further, without a very specific reason, the
choice of using an array shows a complete lack of understanding about
data structures".  Or "Even further, without a very specific reason,
the choice of using a B-tree shows a complete lack of understanding
about data structures".  Both of those are nonsense.  You use the
right tool for the job, and sometimes a simple tool is the right tool
for the job.

   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.

Well, that really depends upon what you're doing.  Query planners and
join strategies are nice if your application is going to put heavy
demands on the relevant parts of the database.  If you have a very
small database that isn't going to grow very much in size or
complexity, and you don't need ACID compliance, transactional
semantics, and all that, what's the problem?

-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk-FrUbXkNCsVf2fBVCVOL8/A at public.gmane.org>

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf-BtI67efEdsDk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org
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"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton

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