Re: Are we mischaracterising mysql? Re: 12 Silver Bullets

On Thu, 16 Aug 2007, Ron Mayer wrote:

> It looks to me like MySQL's niche that postgresql doesn't yet
> touch is in the most complex, most insert/update intensive applications.

Dude, you need to cut back on your dose of marketing kool-aid; that stuff
will kill you. Derek already gutted the Sabre study. Google's Adwords
was a situation where they were willing to roll their own transactional
support sufficient for their purposes on top of the shaky MySQL base, and
that all took place a long time ago--back in those days, the version of
PostgreSQL available at the time wouldn't have been a reasonable
alternative. They're big enough now that they've just gone in and
fixed[1] the stuff that was seriously wrong with MySQL since then to keep
everything going.

The fact that someone operating on the scale of Google can build an
architecture and patch MySQL such that it works well for them is in no way
proof that it's suitable for "the most complex, most insert/update
intensive applications" for the rest of the business world.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/google-mysql-tools/

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD