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Databases

There Is No Reason At All To Use MySQL: MariaDB, MySQL Founder Michael Widenius 241

sfcrazy writes "In this exclusive interview MySQL founder Michael Widenius talks about the reasons of decline of MySQL, what Oracle is doing wrong and how MariaDB is fast replacing it. There are quite some interesting information in this interview. The take out of this interview is '...there is no reason at all to use MySQL 5.5 instead of MariaDB 5.5. The same will be true for the next generation.'" Of course, he has an economic interest in getting people to use MariaDB. Hard to argue that Oracle isn't evil though.
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There Is No Reason At All To Use MySQL: MariaDB, MySQL Founder Michael Widenius

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  • Monty is a stooge (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05, 2013 @05:48PM (#43636793)

    The Maria builds have not been particularly special, and its hard to take anything he says about MySQL seriously. So much doublespeak. Stop posting his rants as relevant or news. This is little more than an ad for his support/consulting org.

  • Sign of OSS maturity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @05:59PM (#43636849)

    Most MySQL/MariaDB users wont care at all about this, because there are millions of them who are not Slashdot or Amazon or Facebook - this DB silently powers millions of Internet connected things, and it's just a given that it works, performs, has fit-for-purpose stability. It's a sign of how far OSS has come when people have the luxury of quibbling over WHICH free, capable DB they want to base their business model on.

  • by dutchwhizzman ( 817898 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @06:23PM (#43636955)
    If you want the "free" version, there isn't a significant difference for 95% of users, agreed. However, MariaDB support is miles better and cheaper than Oracle's "Enterprise MySQL" support is. Also, calling Monty names is cheap and rather unfounded.
  • Re:Postgres (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05, 2013 @06:51PM (#43637089)

    As far as I know, .org's backend has been postgres. It's conderiably harder to run a GTLD than a website, but according to your criteria, it's uninsteresting.

  • Re:First (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wmac1 ( 2478314 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @07:24PM (#43637229)

    Michael Widenius has benefited from gathering millions of developers around his product and letting them down.

    He cannot sell source code of MariaDB this time, but he still can sell the brand name and the community which has trusted him again to earn another fortune. Fool me once, full me twice...

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @07:28PM (#43637247)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by mveloso ( 325617 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @07:49PM (#43637353)

    The main reason to stay away from PostgreSQL is its toolset. Specifically, it's almost impossible to find a tool that allows you to analyze and tune it's performance. I say 'almost' because there may be one out there that I haven't found...but I've looked on and off for years, with no results.

    For mysql there's lots of tools, like jetprofiler. For oracle you can pay. For SQLite, well, who cares. For psql, it's (as one website put it) a black art. Do you really want that as your back end?

  • by Locke2005 ( 849178 ) on Sunday May 05, 2013 @09:05PM (#43637791)
    Oracle has a HUGE economic interest in making sure MySQL sucks bad enough that customers buy Oracle databases instead.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05, 2013 @09:35PM (#43637961)

    Big advice to anyone who ever gets the "bright" idea of trying to port a substantial application from MySQL to Oracle: don't. And if your boss tells you that you have to, start looking for a new job, because it's a fool's errand almost guaranteed to fail. Not even *Oracle* would ever recommend porting an app from MySQL to Oracle. The problem is that MySQL does well in many scenarios as long as you humor its quirks, but those quirks you've humored will come back and destroy your performance, or make it outright impossible to port the application to a database like Oracle at some later point in time. The problem is that MySQL has certain rules and constraints that you CAN work around to get acceptable performance, but those work-arounds are either frowned upon, or point-blank prohibited, by databases like Oracle. Rewriting your query to get good performance out of MySQL will almost certainly result in the same query causing Oracle to either reject it, fall flat on its face, ditch its indices, and/or do full table scans to satisfy you.

  • Re:or sqlite (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Monday May 06, 2013 @12:13AM (#43638897) Journal

    Firebird is trivially embedded with almost zero configuration requirements, yet scales up well and is pretty feature rich. It's a very good option when you think Postgres is overkill.

UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn

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