The long reach of Oracle

[Richard Pieri]

On Jul 11, 2010, at 10:15 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 
> #1 MySQL doesn't compete against oracle database.  They're different
> products, and whenever somebody chooses one or the other, the other wasn't
> really an option.  They each satisfy different needs.

Correct!  MySQL isn't competition for Oracle, never has been.  MySQL and Oracle scale differently.  MySQL scales out horizontally: you put a huge server farm in front of the database backend to improve MySQL performance.  MySQL is very, very good at this, which is a big part of why it's the "M" in the LAMP stack.  Oracle, on the other hand, scales vertically: you just keep adding more and more connections until you run out of resources at which point you transition to a bigger server.

Why would you scale vertically instead of horizontally?  When you need access to hundreds of terabytes of data and you need it *now* because a delay of 1 second costs you hundreds of thousands of dollars or a city power grid loses power (shameless plug: take a look at what local company Enernoc is doing).  This is the meat of Oracle's business, large databases that need to scale up.  You hardly ever hear about these types of installations.  The organizations that run them tend to be very quiet about the details of their operations.  They are out there, however, and they are the meat of Oracle's business.  MySQL doesn't even dream of operating at this level.

The flip side of that is that Oracle doesn't scale well horizontally.  You can do it but Oracle just can't do it as elegantly as MySQL.  And that is why, or a big chunk of why, Oracle bought Sun: to get MySQL.  Not to kill it, but to fill in the gap between Berkeley DB and Oracle DB.

--Rich P.