8 Reasons Not To Use MySQL (And 5 To Adopt It)

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

[Tairan]

Yes, my arguments may be technical in nature, however the arguments in the article are worse than straw-man arguments. I'm surprised the author didn't mention that MySQL doesn't cost $20,000 per processor, therefor must be bad. Even given the intended audience (who, as you suggested, may not be extraordinarily technical) the pro-MySQL author did a much better job laying reasonable arguments.

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

[drinkypoo]

Oracle kicks every other RDBMS at pretty much everything: Stability, speed (optimizations up the wazoo), features, consistency.

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.

[philovivero]

But some +5 commenter pointed out what the 8 points against were, and they sounded lame. Another commenter actually listed 8 real problems with MySQL. But no matter how you slice it, the biggest, baddest, most ass kicking websites on the planet* are powered by MySQL. So... uh... deal with the reality. MySQL isn't going away.

* Google.
* Yahoo.
* Digg**.

** Yeh, I'm the Digg DBA.

Re:The 8 reasons not to use mysql

[jadavis]

Another one:

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.