MySQL & Open Source Code Quality 446
dozek writes "Perhaps another rung for the Open Source model of software development, eWeek reports that an independent study of the MySQL source code found it to be "in fact six times better than that of comparable commercial, proprietary code." You can read the eWeek write-up or the actual research paper (reg. required)."
Six times better? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Informative)
...they quantified it by dividing verified defects by lines of code. MySQL had 0.09 bugs/KLOC while the "commercial" defect density was 0.53 bugs/KLOC. (Their use of the term "commercial" confused me since MySQL is, after all, a "commercial" project, just an open-source one.)
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
The specific errors in MySQL were dereferencing null pointers, failure to deallocate memory (memory leaks), and use an uninitialized variable. These aren't the only bugs that such an analysis can find; they're the ones that were found in MySQL. And they're definitely errors in logic.
Certainly, there are bugs that such an analysis can't find. If you define PI as 3.15, your calculations are going to be off. If you create a function to determine the circumference of a circle as 2 * PI * Diameter, you've got a bug. I suspect that those are the types of errors in logic that you were referring to, and you're right that they will not be caught by a code analysis. However, that doesn't mean that comparing the frequence of the errors that CAN be caught between two programs is an invalid act. From my experience, programmers who make fewer of the former errors also make fewer of the latter. Analyzing catchable errors is a good metric for the frequency of errors in a given source tree, even if all errors aren't caught.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
There are no guarantees, in this business or any other. But i
Kinds of errors -- it's Reasoning, Inc. again (Score:5, Insightful)
It does indeed sound a bit like that, and with good reason. If you notice, the "indepedent review" was carried out by Reasoning, Inc., and we've heard of them before in these parts.
For the benefit of those who haven't seen this trollfest^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hstory in its previous incarnations, Reasoning's services spot what some people call "systematic" errors, things like NULL pointer dereferencing or the use of uninitialised variables. As many people note every time this subject comes up, any smart development team will use a tool like Lint to check their code anyway, as a required step before check-in and/or as a regular, automated check of the entire codebase, and so any smart development team should find all such errors immediately. IOWs, it's grossly unfair to compare open and closed source "code quality" on this basis. Any project that has errors like this in it at all isn't serious about quality, and it shouldn't take an external study to point this out.
Serious code quality is not dictated by how many mechanical errors there are that slip through because of weaknesses in the implementation language. Rather, it is indicated by how many "genuine" logic errors -- cases where the output differs unintentionally from the specifications -- there are. Of course, no automated process can identify those, but to get a meaningful comparison of code quality, you'd need to investigate that aspect, rather than kindergarten mistakes.
There are other objections to their principal metric as well. For starters, source code layout is not normally significant in C, C++ or Java, so any metric based on line count is going to be flawed at best. But the big objection is that they're talking about childish mistakes, and comparing supposedly world class software based on childish mistakes isn't helpful (except to dispel the myth that some big name products have sensible development processes).
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
The code scanners I've looked at will flag potential errors even if it's impossible to reach the error condition in code, so it's possible that some or all of that stuff may never have actually happened, but it's generally better to program defensively anyway. All it takes is for some bozo to change your if condition and all of a sudden you're segving all over your customer's important data. 15 null pointer derefences in nearly a quarter million lines of code is a pretty low number though. I've seen more than that in a single thousand line file written by "professionals."
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
0.09 vs 0.53 bugs/KLOC can also mean mysql has six times the amount of code per line, compared to an average "commercial" program. Those numbers should be divided by a code-density-factor.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
A flawless implementation of a crap algorithm is still crap. I don't care if your bubble-sort routine has no memory leaks or buffer overruns; it still scales O(N^2). Likewise, a so-called "database" which does not implement key features like transactions and stored procedures is fundamentally flawed even if there are zero coding errors.
MySQL may be well-written, but it's still a piece of crap by the standards of any professional DBA.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
MySQL does have transactions, and has had them for quite some time. Stored procedures are due in a future version.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a good data store, but the guys programming it have to "get it" that transactions can't be optional in certain types of databases, and neither can constraints, or fk enforcement.
MySQL has a tendency of failing to do what you thought it did, and failing to report an error so you know. This is a legacy left over from being a SQL interpreter over ISAM files. It makes MySQL a great choice for content management, but a dangerous choice for transactional systems.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm doing my first MySQL work (done a lot of Oracle and a little PostgreSQL) and I was *flabbergasted* when I realized that, when you update a table but the data has not actually changed, you get success and zero rows updated.
Which is exactly what you get (and should get) when you try to update and no rows are found to update.
I suppose with no triggers anyway, it might be a tiny bit faster to skip the actual update when the data hasn't changed, but to real DB folks this is
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
It felt a lot like postgresql to me. I didn't do anything fancy like writing a stored proc or a trigger or something like I've done in Postgresql.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Informative)
MySQL's attitude toward data integrity can be summed up as "if the constraint can't be satisfied, do it half-assed anyway". I find myself having to write application code to manage data integrity with MySQL, something I can take for granted with a real database.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a real world programmer (versus someone living in an academic world of theory) I prefer the what-I-have-works-and-I'm-Working-on-the-rest approach. In the real world, stability and performance are paramount to feature set. Also, when you consider the domain of creating web driven applications, some features of a DB become less important because the state
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
Understand the limitations of the tool you choose to work with and live with it or use a different tool. Nobodies forcing you to use any specific tool.
No, but somebody is trumpeting the lory of that tool as end-all-be-all, while simply ignoring the points of people who dare to break rank, spurn the kool-aid, and point out flaws. I swear every damn slashdot article about open source tools has some thread like this. And every time we get some version of "love it or leave it." What happened to actually
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
I've worked on several projects interacting with SQL databases and I've only seen one really take advantage of the power of the database. Most of them are using Oracle as a glorified DBASE III, and as a glorified DBASE III, MySQL is much less expensive. And I've seen entire companies built around DBASE III applications.
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Insightful)
No.. a flawless implementation of a crap algorithm just doesn't scale well. Of course bug rate is not the only criteria used when evaluating software, but people spend hundreds of man-hours fixing bugs.
It demonstrates that the quality of open source code is not automatically worse than professional proprietary code (which some people believe is the case). The important thing is that it's at least an attempt at formal study (and not simply pers
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Most theoretical work on sorting has assumed randomly-sorted input data. That's an important case, sure. But there are many situations where it's not a val
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Stable algorithms have identical efficiency no matter what kind of order input data had. Non-stable algorithms have predefined best and worst cases.
But, overall - you will not be able to come up with
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit. Every textbook comparison of sort algorithm I've ever seen assumes three cases: nearly-sorted data, random data, and inverse-sorted data. Even if bubblesort were the fastest for nearly-sorted data (Working from memory, I'm pretty sure it would run in O(n) as it's best case), it's still O(n^2) for the other two cases. Quicksort, heapsort, and insertion sort all scale differently; but even assuming their best-case performa
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem with that is that it assumes the same "code density". Granted, it's probably not going to differ by a factor of six, but remember the old question about programmer productivity:
who's more productive: the coder who solves a given problem with 100 lines of code written in one hour, or the coder who solves it with 10 lines in two hours?
I mean, simple stuff like doing this:
Re:If you would RTFA... (Score:4, Insightful)
If I write a script to go through my C and perl code, and make sure that there's a newline before and after every brace, that will approximately double the lines of code, and will thus cut my error rate in half.
This isn't a joke; I've done this on a couple of projects where they measured output by lines of code, just to illustrate the real impact of such measures.
OTOH, if I deleted the comments from my code, that would approximately double my error rate, so I guess I won't do that.
I'm also reminded of a project that I worked on a while back in which nearly every routine had some sort of error, sometimes several, and I didn't fix any of them. This would look really bad, I know. But you can probably guess what my task was. I was writing a test suite for a compiler. Most of the tests were to verify that the compiler would catch a particular kind of error. So of course my code contained that error, and the test script verified that the result was the proper error message.
This is one of the fundamental problems with nearly every definition I've ever seen of "quality code". They usually don't measure the suitability of the code for the task. If your task is to measure a system's response to failures, you code will of course intentionally produce those errors in order to determine the system's responses. So what is an error in other situations is exactly correct code. Counting errors detected without asking what the task was gives you exactly the wrong results in such a case.
I'm not sure I'd want my name associated with a project that didn't include this sort of test code in the basic distribution. If there are problems with an installation, I want to know about them before the users start using the stuff. And I want to know in a manner that will pinpoint the problems, not from the usual bug report that typically describes some symptom that is only remotely related to the actual problem. So nearly everything that I work on has a component with a high error rate, run under the control of a script that verifies the correctness of thee error messages. If the installation doesn't handle the errors correctly, the users are given output that will tell me what the problem is.
I'd only be impressed by a study that handles such a test suite correctly. One that counts such "errors" is worse than useless; it actively discourages useful test suites.
(Actually, just before reading this
Re:Six times better? (Score:4, Insightful)
MySQL had a defect density of 0.09 and the industry standard was found to be 0.57 defects per thousand lines of code.
The MySQL development team has since fixed all of the 'defects' that were found in the study. (which ranged from a few uninitialized variables prior to usage to memory leaks).
Re:Six times better? (Score:2)
Re:Six times better? (Score:2)
Re:Six times better? (Score:4, Informative)
Basically, it's no different from running your code through BoundsChecker or CodeWizard, or any number of other such tools that check for obvious errors (Null pointers, obvious buffer overflows, dangling references, etc..)
While I have no doubt that MySQL's code is perhaps "cleaner" than your typical unpublished code, I have plenty of doubt that MySQL's code is "better" than unpublished code in terms of efficiency, logic errors, etc..
Just wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, it's really that bad. Gets the job done, though. Hell to maintain. Probably would've helped if I documented any of it.
Maybe I should read that Code Complete book I keep meaning to read sometime.
Re:Just wait... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't rest on your laurels. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps another rung for the Open Source model of software development
Uhh... no.
It's is a glowing report for this particular open source project but that brush shouldn't be used to paint all open source. That will just lull open source developers into a false sense of euphoric contentment. Code quality didn't get this far by having a fixed target, that target should be a carrot on a stick that will never quite be reached.
Re:Don't rest on your laurels. (Score:4, Insightful)
The "rung" in question here is the one where open source progresses in those peoples minds from "must be worse" to "can be as good or better"
There's no suggestion of "all open source is better" anywhere.
Re:Don't rest on your laurels. (Score:2, Insightful)
it's still unfortunately the case that open source software is automatically worse the proprietry software
All software sucks, the degree of suckiness is what matters.
Reasoning? (Score:2)
Um, so they just guessed that the code was six times better. Okay.
Measurements (Score:5, Insightful)
Undoubtedly()
{
when();
you = measure(quality);
in.defects();
per->lines_of(code, anyone);
can = write(good, solid, code);
}
Re:Measurements (Score:5, Funny)
Post:2: In function `Undoubtedly':
Post:3: warning: implicit declaration of function `when'
Post:4: `you' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:4: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
Post:4: for each function it appears in.)
Post:4: warning: implicit declaration of function `measure'
Post:4: `quality' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:5: `in' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:6: `per' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:6: `code' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:6: `anyone' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:7: `can' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:7: warning: implicit declaration of function `write' Post:7: `good' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:7: `solid' undeclared (first use in this function)
Post:8: warning: control reaches end of non-void function
Re:Measurements (Score:2)
How did I know someone would run this through a compiler?? Actually, I forgot to include the appropriate header, so it's only one error!
Re:Measurements (Score:3, Funny)
Clearly biased! (Score:2, Funny)
On paper it looks better (Score:3, Insightful)
Just my 0.03 (adjusted for inflation)
Re:On paper it looks better (Score:2)
I think a wet donkey in a vat of Jello with post-it notes attached to it's back has better performance than the MS SQL servers of old that I encountered, but to be fair, I haven't seen the 2003 version.
Re:On paper it looks better (Score:3, Interesting)
I shouldn't complain -- I've made a lot of money over the years cleaning up the messes left by inexperienced people who thought Access or MySQL were real databases.
Lines of Code? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lines of Code? (Score:5, Insightful)
All that's missing ... (Score:5, Interesting)
As strong proponent of MySQL, I'd be very curious to see how it stacks up in those regards.
Stanford Checker (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone know how this one [stanford.edu] is faring? Will it ever be released? It's based on GCC, right? How many students can it pass between until it's "distribution"?
The reason I'm asking is because I saw that one member of the team has jumped over to a company called Coverity [coverity.com] where one can read:
I just think it'd be horrible if they used the GPL'ed GCC to develop their methods (having access to a full portable compiler onto which to do research and development is hardly a "small thing"), and then lock these same methods away from the community.
I'm grateful for their work on checking linux, but really... this smells bad, IMHO.
(If you don't know what I'm taking about, don't assume it's off-topic, okay? The Standford Checker is a related topic to the Reasoning analysis of MySQL, and I'm not sure we'll ever have a _better_ fitting topic to discuss this)
Re:Stanford Checker (Score:2)
This arrangement is a good thing - it allows everyone to use GCC as they see fit with a minimum of restrictions.
Re:Stanford Checker (Score:5, Interesting)
I post the bugs and stuff that it finds on kbugs.org. [kbugs.org] The most recent kernel that I've posted is 2.6.0-test11.
One thing that I was working on a couple weeks ago was invalid uses of spinlocks. Here [kbugs.org] are my results from that. I found quite a few places that don't unlock their spinlocks on error paths etc.
Debatable scale (Score:5, Insightful)
* It does not take into account the design of the software. This is often as important as the actual quality of the code.
* It does not take into account the kind of errors. This is related to the first, but a buffer overflow that allows root access is worse than a failed instruction.
* It does not even take the length of lines into account. Shortening the lines could lower the number, without actually changing anything.
So, small victory, but the race goes on.
Re:Debatable scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Also if "lines of code" are going to be part of any code comparisions, then a standard should be propsed that does (at a minimum) the following:
1. Formats the code consistently. We don't want one project to have more lines of code (and therefore less bug density) because they put a brace or parenthesis on a separate line while others do not.
2. Strip the comments. Someone could decrease bug density by heavy, heavy commenting. Comments are a vital part of coding (and more usually is better), but they have no impact on the bugginess of the code.
3. Format conditionals, blocks, and function calls consistently, or better yet, ditch the line counting and count bugs per (function call, assignment operation, operation).
Lines are easy to count, but they hold so little meaning in determing code quality.
Re:Debatable scale (Score:5, Interesting)
It's actually a really miserable scale because of your 3rd point. If they ran the code bases through something like cindent and standardized the code formatting and removed all comments and whitespace then it's a somewhat more valid comparison. I didn't look at the actual research paper -- maybe they did. Odds are, your other two points are valid though.
Additionally, they only say that the commercial code is "comparable". What does that mean (again, maybe answered in the paper)? Do they have roughly the same features? Are the query optimizers of roughly the same quality? Do they support the same platforms? I can't think of a major commercial database that doesn't exceed MySQL in all of these areas (ok, excepting SQL Server which fails on the 3rd only). Maybe it was a minor player in commercial databases. Dunno.
These are the kinds of points that are raised when someone bashes OSS. There's no reason that they shouldn't be raised when the inverse is true as well. MySQL has progressed nicely and is worthy of consideration for light to moderate database loads now, I don't question that. All I'm saying is don't take things at face value.
So, small victory, but the race goes on.
The nice thing is that this is small and succinct -- it's suitable for showing to upper level management. That's a big win IMHO -- because normally the text bites they read are biased against free/open software.
Re:Debatable scale (Score:2)
I agree that MySQL is not the best database around, but here you are clearly exagerating.
Moreover, more and more of the sore points (proper transaction support, foreign keys, online backups, innodb tables, ...) are getting fixed in the newer 4.x releases. Recent MySQL version are actually quite decent.
So, implying that MySQL sucks worse than SQL Server excep
Re:Debatable scale (Score:3, Interesting)
But the existence of alternative scales does not detract from the original assessment of defects/line unless we have separate knowledge that OSS is unfavorably biased. Do we have reason to believe that OSS is more poorly designed than commericial software, or that OSS has more ser
Re:Debatable scale (Score:3, Insightful)
If the bloated program has only 5 times as much bugs as the small one, it would still be considered "twice as good", because it has ten times more code for the same task!
6 times better? (Score:5, Insightful)
This just looks like some quasi-scientific statement, trying to express things as a number that really don't fit such a representation. For example, as the number of defects decreases, it becomes increasingly more difficult to find the ones that are left. And is code that contains no bugs at all infinitely much better than code that contains a single bug which hardly ever occurs?
Re:6 times better? (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately for the "model", there is no substantial piece of code that contains just one rarely occuring bug, let alone code that contains no bugs at all. Therefore such infinities never need to be considered in real life cases.
But if you think of it theoretically, if that one rarely occuring bug potentailly causes your company go bankrupt (like being sued for huge damages), t
As John Carmack put it... (Score:5, Interesting)
OSS To Vendors (Score:3, Funny)
Neener neener!
Now, I'm sure we can all be very mature about this...
Don't generalize! (Score:4, Informative)
1. This cannot be generalized into a property of all open source projects.
2. It's more a tribute to the architecture and original core developers of MySQL than anything else.
3. Realize that even though MySQL is an open source product, MySQL AB is the *company* that organizes and pays for MySQL development. So, again, you can't generalize this into something that covers late night hackers working on personal projects in their basements (the open source geek fantasy).
MySQL is awesome! But let's be careful about this story, okay? It's the over-generalization that gives OSS/Linux advocates a bad name ("The Gimp is equivalent to Photoshop!").
Re:Don't generalize! (Score:5, Insightful)
No it doesn't. It "proves" that on average, by line, MySQL has fewer errors in code. It says nothing of the severity of the errors in either package.
Furthermore- MySQL is not even close to being equal in feature set to almost any commercial DB; replication/backup sucks, it's not ACID compliant, it had no transaction support until recently, no stored procedures, no triggers.
How on earth could you possibly compare it to almost any commercial SQL DB which has all these...and say MySQL is better?
A lot of people knew that.
No, every two bit web designer thinks its the greatest thing since sliced bread, since they think a select w/group+sort is an advanced query. Every professional DBA I've met refuses to work with MySQL and/or hates it, and they can go on for an hour about why. When are you people going to realize that PostgreSQL is so much better than MySQL, save some incredibly risky performance options?
MySQL is awesome! But let's be careful about this story, okay? It's the over-generalization that gives OSS/Linux advocates a bad name ("The Gimp is equivalent to Photoshop!").
But you just said "This proves that MySQL is better than commercial offerings!"
Re:Don't generalize! (Score:3, Insightful)
0.09 errors per line code?! (Score:2)
Must have been baaad commercial code then.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Take for instance the part that takes as input the key index size and calculates internal buffer sizes. The option's size is an unsigned long long, but they cast it to an unsigned long all over the place, do in-place bitshifting on the cast (and cause it to wrap -- try specifying 4G for your key index sometime and you'll get 0), and the quality of code in that case is just painfully horrible to look at or even figure out what it's doing.
I could only shudder to think what the quality of the commercial product looked like, in comparison. Hell, I'll have nightmares if I consider the quality of MySQL++ as a comparison..
--jordan
Total Crock (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong I love MySQL, but these types of articles are just as bad as the people saying that MacOS X isn't that secure because of the less users on it. Or the guy claiming that MS is way superior in the Internet Server world. These type of articles are just there to cause controversy and seperate us as a community Mac/Windows/Linux combined.
I am not putting any merrit in this article and neither should you.
That's not precise. (Score:2)
Hardly fair (Score:3, Insightful)
Now apply to IE patches.... (Score:2, Funny)
Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches...
Re:Now apply to IE patches.... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Now apply the 'Rule of 6 times' to Microsoft's closed source IE patches..."
There is no 'Rule of 6 times'. An analysis concluded that MySQL had a very limited number of defects in their code base. Kudos to them. This doesn't define a rule to be used in the open source vs. closed source holy war.
MySQL is a "TOY" as far as RDBM'S goes (Score:3, Insightful)
Defects... (Score:2)
Why not fix them?
MS SQL Server (Score:3, Funny)
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
This is proof positive that the marketing engine has started churning in the Linux / Open Source arena. The quoted statistics are meaningless. Here are is a short list of things (in no particular order) that are wrong with this "study" (who paid for it anyway?):
Lines of code is meaningless as a reliable measure of anything. The most this number can be used for is for assessing the high level complexity (i.e. simple, non-trivial, or hard) of an application / code construct. It is absolutely pointless to compare two different applications against each other by lines of code. This means that you can say that one is non-trivial and the other is complex or you can say that both are complex, but there is no valid way of determining (by using this particular metric) that one application is more complex than the other. I believe this is the fundamental flaw in this "study".
The study igores capabilities. If application A has feature a, b, and c, and application B has features a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h , is it even meaningful to compare the number of defects detected between applications A and B? And no - normalizing it by lines of code is not valid (see previous point).
Testing methodology : from the defects quoted in the article, it appears as if they "study" did white box testing on MySQL. This is hardly complete. While null pointer dereferences are certainly terrible, I would be also very very concerned about bugs pertaining to SQL capabilites, data integrity, performance, etc. If I go out and do a comparison of RDBMS's for a client, my report wouldnt be complete at all without covering these areas. How come the "study" doesnt mention any of these things?
Lets face it : this is a paid propaganda article by the marketing machinery. Much like Microsoft has done in the past.
It is embarassing to show bad code. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but there is a small percentage of coders when presented with an ugly solution to a problem, will pretty it up, just "because". And it is a good way to get known in the OSS world.
Unlike the corporate world, working but ugly code is hidden deeper and deeper, and people go out of their way to avoid it.
Toy DBMS (Score:3, Interesting)
No matter how good the coding itself, if the design is broken, the tool is broken, period.
And MySQL has a broken design. So broken that the upgrade path isn't MySQL X or something the like, but MaxSQL -- in fact, rebranded SAPdb. That SAPdb is at most at Oracle v7.2 levels tells lots about MySQL.
I could be more specific, but do your own research in Google -- lack of SQL compliance, lack of features to enable declarative coding at the server instead of procedural client code, and so on.
Now, the interesting part. Suppose MySQL AB would have a sudden insight and repent of their un-SQL, anti-relational ways. Unlikely, you say; yet possible. Now suddenly they have to recode, or change drastically the current code. The resulting tool will be probably much bigger than the current, because SQL is baroque; or even worse than much bigger, because of MySQL backwards compatibility.
The sheer bloat will make even this faulty measure of bugs/KLoC skyrocket. Now, run the comparision again...
Not to say SQL compliance shouldn't be attained. In fact, bloat in the SQL DBMS is a more than good enough tradeoff against bloat in the application. The ideal would be a RDBMS, but while there isn't a MyDataphor a SQL DBMS should do.
Even today, I don't care about comparing to, say, Oracle or MS SQL Server. IBM DB2 would be a better baseline, but best of all the real competitors: PostgreSQL and Alphora Dataphor.
Re:Toy DBMS (Score:3, Informative)
> baseline, but best of all the real competitors: PostgreSQL and Alphora Dataphor.
I think you've got your dbms' mixed-up:
Oracle, Informix, and DB2 are all of comparable complexity and power: Oracle's partitioning is the simplest and its clustering the most complex. DB2 & Informix have more complex partitioning - but can scale beowulf-style to hundreds (if not thousands of separate servers).
SQL
MySQL and Commercial Licenses (Score:3, Interesting)
MySQL GPL'ed all their products. (presumably so they could get developers and bug-fixes to their product for no charge.) However, they offer "commercial" licenses for people who want to integrate MySQL into their software, but don't want to GPL it. How can they do that? Presumably, any improvements/bugfixes/modifications that came from the community would be GPL, and therefore cannot be re-integrated under a more restricted license. I'm a little confused here. How can they take code that has been released under the GPL and turn around and release it under a more restrictive license?
Re:MySQL and Commercial Licenses (Score:3, Informative)
The FSF demands you to sign your righs over because they want to be able to effectively and easily defend the copyrights of all GNU software in court. For example, if GNU software is having its copyright infringed, they want to be able to go right ahead and act with immediate legal authority on that software, rather than having to track down every single contributor to that project-- some of whom may no longer be contactable-- and get permission to proceed with a legal action. They are open
SCO Has Just Announced (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
Slashdot is a bad commercial for MySQL. (Score:2)
Re:Slashdot is a bad commercial for MySQL. (Score:5, Funny)
That's not the db... around here, we call them "trolls"...
;)
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Duh! (Score:4, Informative)
those are just bugs! what about lack of features?
at least there's row-level locking now... finally.
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
on mysql 3.x, the table types that support foreign key constraints don't support transactions, and vice versa.
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
Your analogy limps. Did most other operating systems support fast user switching in 1998? No, and especially not Windows' biggest competition on the desktop.
On the contrary, PostgreSQL has had decent foreign key and transaction and subquery support since 1999.
MySQL STILL doesn't support subqueries in a production version. Foreign keys are only supported by one table type. It doesn't support views. I could go on, but if you really want to see the di
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes I do. And I have revived and made perform to to spec god knows how many cretinous foreign key designs by a combination of
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Duh! (Score:2)
If that had been your first post, you'd have gotten some mod points.
Re:Duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
MS has a buggy os and an awful model for business practice, but I think MS SQL server is a fairly nice offering. It's too bad it only runs on Windows servers though.
MS SQL Sybase ASE (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Duh! (Score:2, Insightful)
RTFA (Score:2)
Re:"6 times better" (Score:4, Insightful)
If you just RTFA, you'll see that is not "6 times better" but "6 times less bugs found then the average on commercial products"
The only thing wrong in the article:
They should replace the term "commercial" with "closed source", because Mysql is also a commercial product and what makes it different is the open source model.
Re:"6 times better" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:New unit ? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New unit ? (GNU unit?) (Score:2)
Let's call it the Linus !!
Great, then we'll have people arguing that we should call it the GNU/Linus!
DMCA Offense! (Score:3, Funny)
MrHanky, you now must either pay us for the use of said file ($699) or ceist and decist.
We hold rights to your future earnings from your use of our file, and we option the rights to your childrens earnings.
Thank you
Daryl
soo so sorry... It just popped into my head...
Re:MySQL vs. Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but my opinion is pretty strong on this. Going from anything Oracle to MySQL is NOT trivial.
Re:MySQL vs. Oracle (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MySQL vs. Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
1. usage of vendor extensions
2. usage of standard relational functionality
Generally speaking, if you've minimized #1 in your application you can easily port between Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Sybase, Postgesql, etc: sure, you could hit some issues with jdbc drivers, and may need to port a few idioms (partitioning for example), but it shouldn't be a killer. But going from any of the above list to mysql isn't suggested: you'll get hung up on #2 (it doesn't support standard SQL or DDL)
Realistically, if I wanted to go to a less expensive product than oracle I'd look down this list:
- db2 (1/3 to 1/2 oracle cost)
- sybase (cheaper than oracle, but dwindling market share)
- firebird (very low cost)
- postgresql (free)
All of the above are mature relational databases that you could port oracle applications from.
But you mentioned 'mission critical'. At this point I'd be very cautious about either postgesql or mysql in a mission-critical role. How important is it to you that you can recover 100% of your data in the event of a database crash? I'd put my money (and career) on db2 or oracle delivering that kind of quality over mysql...