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."
postgres didn't do so badly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Oh, bruther (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Oh, bruther (Score:3, Interesting)
MS SQL does a pretty good job optimizing common queries, but at a tremendous cost in orthogonality of T-SQL. I've also found limitations in MS SQL handling of very complex queries, but there is no question that on the kinds of queries that dominate in the vast majority of applications, MS SQL provides reliably good performance out of the box.
That's an engineering trade-off that works for lots of people.
That said, you're going about this the wrong way. The solution to generally inconsistent query performance is database administration, not tweaking. That's "user unfriendly" because it's a job for a DBA, not a user. Oracle gives you much, much more access to the innards of the system, and its stuff that even most tech savvy developers aren't really competent to play with.
Oracle should give comparable performance to MS SQL in most instances without tweaking. Certainly you shouldn't be seeing a difference of 10x in performance that you have to correct by tweaking. My guess is something is really really screwed up on the Oracle installation you were working with.
Finally you also have to evaluate the performance of the query under production conditions, not developer conditions: many large tables simultaneously handling heavy update loads with lots of concurrency issues. The results you are talking about are so screwy, though, it's clear that you've got a really mis-configured system.
Re:Oh, bruther (Score:3, Interesting)
Thank you! I thought it was just me!
I did the same test a couple of years ago. I was writing an app for a huge data set, but I was told to do the proof-of-concept on both Oracle and SQL Server. I used two identical servers, identical SAN volumes, etc...
The result was shocking. Oracle is at least 5x as slow as SQL Server. It seems to pick acceptable query plans, but for some reason it's just... slower.
One possible explanation that occurred to me is that SQL Server clusters all data by default, whereas that's an optional 'feature' in Oracle. If you try to cluster data in Oracle, it can break other functionality, so it's not the default and developers can't always just turn it on.
Inserting bulk text seems to be awfully slow for some reason as well, and I couldn't figure it out. I saw forum posts along the lines of "well of course it's slow, you're working with text". Meanwhile, SQL Server was doing the exact same thing 50x faster.
Now I don't wonder any more why the Oracle EULA prohibits benchmarking.
Try googling for "Oracle Benchmark". You'll be lucky to find 2 or 3 on the entire internet that compare it to something else, and weren't done by Oracle themselves.