Re: Differentiating different Open Source databases

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 11:21 AM, Alastair Turner <bell(at)ctrlf5(dot)co(dot)za> wrote:
> In some ways you're saying proves Jim's point. A pragmatic definition
> of "better" would be "more appropriate" or "a better fit' - a better
> fit for the workload or possibly the organisation's existing skills
> and along with the skills habits and expectations.

Sure. I did not disagree with the meat of what Jim said. I am not sure
it is possible to effectively execute what he wants to do, but I don't
think he is wrong at all.

> The examples you're quoting above are foreign to decision makers with
> a background in commercial RDBMSs like DB/2, MSSQL, etc. Insurance
> brokerages with 200 staff members don't care about 1000 server farms -
> they want expression indexes, partial indexes, CTEs and a bunch of
> other things which they've come to expect from relation databases.

The point of what I said was to make it very clear that Dimitri is
wrong. Saying MySQL sucks is not productive at all.

> The mistake which these not entirely hypothetical managers (I have met
> a few too) are making about in assuming equality between all open
> source databases is much as the same as you mistake in claiming that
> the features which matter to myfacedoubleclickspacebook are the only
> ones that matter.

Different strokes for different folks. I never said that those
features are the only ones that matter. Do note that most of the
features I mentioned don't help one run a big farm. Covering indexes
are assumed to be everywhere at this point. Checksuming data on disk
is just a good practice. I can continue at length.

My point is that beating up on MySQL ("only get so far") is often
wrong, intellectually dishonest and a discredit to the community.

--
Rob Wultsch
wultsch(at)gmail(dot)com