8 Reasons Not To Use MySQL (And 5 To Adopt It) 288
Esther Schindler writes "Database decisions are never easy, even — or maybe especially — when one choice is extremely popular. To highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the open-source MySQL DBMS, CIO.com asked two open-source experts to enumerate the reasons to choose MySQL and to pick something else. Tina Gasperson takes the 5 reasons to use MySQL side, and Brent Toderash discusses 8 reasons not to. Note that this isn't an 'open source vs proprietary databases' comparison; it's about MySQL's suitability in enterprise situations."
Re:Reasons not to use MySQL? These are stupid reas (Score:2, Interesting)
You mention Excel jokingly, but I know some companies which maintain large databases worth of information inside of Excel (statistics on hundreds of applications for hundreds of devices on dozens of networks, reported daily ) because no one wants to write a script to input data into a database.
Re:lame "bias" argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Last time I checked, DB2 was more scalable than Oracle (less performance hit as you stuffed the database) and both Sybase and SQL Server were faster.
I tried to pay attention. I really did. (Score:2, Interesting)
* Google.
* Yahoo.
* Digg**.
** Yeh, I'm the Digg DBA.
Re:The 8 reasons not to use mysql (Score:3, Interesting)
Does MySQL still use a rule-based planner?
Without having an effective cost-based planner (like PostgreSQL) the performance for non-trivial (from a planning perspective) queries will never be competitive.
If using a rule-based planner, how does MySQL know when to use a hash aggregate versus a sort + group aggregate? How does it determine join order without keeping statistics about the nature of the data stored in the tables? How does it know whether to hash join vs. merge join? What happens when the nature of the data in the tables changes enough such that what was good before is no longer good?
A cost based planner is crucial.