Success -- MySQL / MyODBC install

[Jeffrey Watts]

On Thu, 6 Apr 2000, michael d hoskins wrote:

> I think MySQL is far advanced in database features, scalability,
> programming languages, stability, speed, fault tolerance, etc. to
> Access, Foxpro, and Filemaker Pro, so I don't think it's directly
> comparable to them.

Correct, except the internal structure (the way it actually works) is much
closer to those three.  It may be somewhat unfair to put MySQL in the same
category as those three, but from a design perspective that is a more
accurate comparison.  Coincidentally, this is also the perspective that
most businesses take in evaluating DBMSes.

Fault tolerance is the Achilles' heel here -- why do you think that MySQL
has inherent advantages?  Did I miss something in my analysis of MySQL?  
Without transactions, database recovery is questionable after a crash. All
three databases face the same problems in this regard.  You can
programmatically work around the potential problems with a system crash,
by making your application save its own state and check itself after a
crash, but that is a severe disadvantage considering the real-world
situation where developers come and go, and managers have to worry about
consistency and reliability of the application given many developers.
Usually it's easier to have the database control reliability, and have the
developers simply write code (a bit of an over-simplication).

The whole point of a DataBase Management System is to abstract the
implementation and maintenance of a database away from the use.  Coding
around an inherent limitation is a costly endeavour, and whomever decides
to use a solution like MySQL should think well in advance what they are
doing and whether they feel that their website (or whatever) needs ultra
performance at the cost of stability.

My fear is that a lot of people really don't understand when to use MySQL,
and when to use PostgreSQL.  But I suppose at least they aren't using
something like Access.

> MySQL is ultra fast for small to many medium-sized databases, and
> usually annihilates just about anything else.  Postgres might actually
> be faster for small to medium databases, compared to Oracle and the
> other "big guys."  For really large databases, the big guys (on
> appropriate hardware and with proper tuning,) will almost certainly
> annhiliate MySQL and Postgres.  And they can certainly scale far
> beyond MySQL and Postgres.

That's a very fair analysis, though I believe that the benchmarks run by
the PostgreSQL people show that Oracle performs very similarly, and in
some situations as much 10% faster on small to medium databases.

So, Oracle may be a good choice if you need both performance and
reliability and money is no problem.  :-)

Jeffrey.

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