[Discuss] Rob Conery's critique of MySQL?

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

Mark Woodward <markw at mohawksoft.com> writes:

> On 07/30/2012 05:28 PM, Derek Atkins wrote:
>> Sure, and there's a lot to be said for using tools with which you
>> are comfortable. Like everything, it's a tool. The key is using the
>> right tool for the job. Just because you need an RDBMS does NOT
>> imply that PG is *the* right tool. It is *a* right tool. There are
>> other choices, and those other choices *are* valid. It all depends
>> on the requirements. Without knowing the requirements all other
>> discussion is purely rhetorical or religious, neither of which
>> belong on a technical list.
>
> As a start, off the top of my head, I can describe one MySQL problem
> that absolutely eliminates it from consideration for a production
> database.
>
> Suppose you have the "street map" database of the USA or some other
> very very large table, millions of rows. In production, your query
> performance is poor. You do some analysis and work out an index that
> betters your query performance substantially. You want to deploy that
> new index WITHOUT bringing down the site. Well, with MySQL, "create
> index" and "drop index" LOCK the tables as they are operating. LOCK
> THE TABLES. Think about that. In PostgreSQL, Oracle, and any "real"
> database, "create index" and "drop index" only impact performance in
> as much as any other transaction. When they are done, presto! your
> query is faster. Neat, huh?
>
> That is just one problem that I consider a show stopper. You should
> watch the first 15 minutes of the video that started this message
> chain. In fact, I would wager, if you watched the whole thing, you'd
> never consider MySQL again.

It's a show stopper if you have an application that needs that large a
piece of data.  However if you only need a half-dozen tables with a few
hundred or maybe a few thousand lines, then this isn't an issue.

Sure, PG is "technically" better in that it doesn't have this drawback,
but in the real-world example of a low-end application you just never
hit those cases where PG really shows its strengths.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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