Re: Justifying a PG over MySQL approach to a project

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Madison Kelly <linux(at)alteeve(dot)com> wrote:
> Gauthier, Dave wrote:
>>
>> Hi Everyone:
>>
>>
>> Tomorrow, I will need to present to a group of managers (who know nothing
>> about DBs) why I chose to use PG over MySQL in a project, MySQL being the
>> more popular DB choice with other engineers, and managers fearing things
>> that are “different” (risk).  I have a few hard tecnical reasons (check
>> constraint, deferred constraint checking, array data type), but I’m looking
>> for a “it’s more reliable” reasons.  Again, the audience is managers.  Is
>> there an impartial,  3^rd party evaluation of the 2 DBs out there that
>> identifies PG as being more reliable?  It might mention things like fewer
>> incidences of corrupt tables/indexes, fewer deamon crashes, better recovery
>> after system crashes, etc... ?
>>
>>
>> Thanks !
>
> There is a current question about the survivability of MySQL right now with
> the potential sale of MySQL. I would not bank on MySQL for any long-term
> project. I am sure that MySQL will live in the long run, but they may well
> be turbulent times ahead if whomever comes to own MySQL decides to neglect
> or kill it and the source gets forked.

It's important to separate out MySQL AB the company, owned by Sun,
soon to be owned by Oracle, from MySQL the GPL licensed database,
which may or may not allow you to distribute your own commercial code
without buying a license. Given the OSS License loophole, and the
fact that many of those OSS licenses do NOT require the release of
source code, there's every possibiliy you could release your
commercial code under the BSD code to yourself, and then give only the
compiled code to customers and you'd technically be safe distributing
MySQL with it.

There are several companies in the MySQL biosphere that are releasing
their own forks of MySQL with lots of bug fixes, and I have no doubt
that MySQL the GPL database will continue to be available as a GPL
product for quite some time. However, the availability of
commercially licensed MySQL may or may not continue based on the
business needs of Oracle.

For in house use only, this is a non-issue, as the GPL only affects
distribution of MySQL, not internal usage.

The biggest argument I'd use against MySQL in general is that
PostgreSQL is a better database for any time your data and its
integrity are important.