MySQL Outpacing Oracle In Wake of Acquisition 157
snydeq writes "Results from the 2010 Eclipse User Survey reveal interesting trends surrounding open source usage and opinions, writes InfoWorld's Savio Rodrigues. Linux usage among developers is on the rise, at the expense of Windows, and MySQL has pulled ahead of Oracle, by a factor of 3-to-2, as the database of choice among Eclipse developers. 'The data demonstrate that fears surrounding Oracle's control over MySQL have not resulted in lower use of MySQL in favor of an alternative open source database,' Rodrigues writes."
Re:Nice to them (Score:3, Informative)
I like Oracle, its products and technologies and I am glad that its opensource products are gaining sales. I wish good luck to Oracle.
I like Oracles's database, it's a great database with tons of features but it's pretty expensive. However the business software that oracle sells is a PITA.
Re:postgres didn't do so badly (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nice to them (Score:4, Informative)
If you developed using Postgres, or another more compliant database, most of these problems would go away.
Re:State of the Databases (Score:3, Informative)
If they really need world class support, then they ought to use db2 - its better than Oracle in every dimension, even if you include Larry Ellison's yacht.
If they just need something that works properly, then Postgresql will solve their problems.
Disclaimer: I have frequently been a victim of Oracle since Oracle 5.
Re:Oh, bruther (Score:4, Informative)
In short, two equally smart database systems should perform about the same.
Bingo. Ergo, something is wrong with your Oracle installations.
I've done the same, supported an application that is available for MS SQL, Oracle and Sybase Sql Anywhere. MS SQL and Oracle blow SQL Anywhere out of the water in performance, but in most situations you couldn't tell the difference.
From a developer's POV, SQL Anywhere was in most cases a pleasure to work with, Oracle was acceptable in most cases and outstanding in a few, and MS SQL was a horrible PITA. MS SQL doesn't even provide you with a utility to get a human readable dump of the transaction log, much less any way to use the transaction log in a complex recovery (unless you fancy working with page addresses). When a customer does something really stupid, and calls you up saying, "please, please make it like that never happened," it's as easy as rolling off a log in Oracle, practical in SQL Anywhere and not worth doing in MS SQL.
Re:Oh, bruther (Score:3, Informative)
Well, one thing I don't like about Oracle is its rapaciously sales-oriented corporate culture. Of course business is all about making sales, but Oracle really doesn't care of you bought the wrong thing or spent 10x what you needed to. They don't care if you buy the wrong class of license and have to throw it away because it doesn't work for you. I've seen cases where organizations have paid huge amounts of money to get Oracle Enterprise where they only intended to use features in Oracle Standard at a tiny fraction of the price. I've seen customers buy per seat licenses, not being informed that that requires a CAL for every computer or device (e.g. phone) that uses Oracle hosted data, then have to pay through the nose for CALs or throw out their CALs and buy a per processor license.
Oracle really doesn't care if you buy something from them that will make you really really mad at them a few months down the line, so long as they have your signature on the dotted line and your money in the bank.
That's not the way customers should be treated. Not if you want them to be loyal.
I'm talking rather of Oracle's technical merits, which are considerable, and in many cases unique. But if you can get away with not using a product's unique abilities, your way better off if you have to port away from it in the future. The same goes for MySQL, which has unique aspects that are not features, per se, but idiosyncrasies. Both Oracle and MySQL are not easy products to port away from, unless you're using really, really common denominator features through some kind of abstraction layer like Hibernate.
Re:Nice to them (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the time, people use a database because they care about their data. That's really the point of a database - to provide a persistent store for a load of data that is as difficult as possible to accidentally break. Ideally it should be fast as well, and allow you to access the data in complex ways.
A number of rules in SQL are quite pedantic for precisely this reason. If you enter something invalid then the database could guess what you meant, and might even be right 90% of the time. The other 10% of the time, it would be silently corrupting or destroying parts of your database, or maybe just discarding part of the data that you thought was persistently stored.
MySQL deviates from standard SQL in a number of ways, allowing things that are wrong to do something. Exactly what 'something' is depends on the version of MySQL that you are using.
Basically, using MySQL is like running with a load of error checking disabled. Sure, it's irritating that your code compiled with a load of assert() statements keeps breaking with an assert failure, but generally it's better to see the error and fix it than to deploy a production system after just commenting out the assert() line.