Oracle

[Dave Hull]

Quoting Frank Wiles <frank at wiles.org>:

> On Tue,  8 Mar 2005 09:44:43 -0600
> Dave Hull <dphull at insipid.com> wrote:
>
> > MySQL is much easier to manage than Oracle, IMHO. But if you're
> > dealing with money, it's probably a safer bet to stick with Oracle,
> > though I'm not sure that's going to be true for much longer.
>
>   If you're dealing with money... now that is a silly reason.  Oracle
>   is no more safe than PostgreSQL, it's called making a good backup.
>
>   I use PostgreSQL every day for money related transactions in the
>   hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I intentionally left PostgreSQL out of my comments because I have almost zero
experience with it. From what I've read, it's as capable as Oracle. Something
MySQL had not been until recently since they lacked support for referential
integrity, atomic transactions and stored procedures.

The version of MySQL we're now using has enforced referential integrity and full
transaction support. The performance is amazingly good and the care and feeding
required are minimal. We've been using it for almost a year and I believe it
just came out of beta... shh, don't tell my superiors I had deployed a beta
product in a production environment handling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I wish I could say the same about the care and feeding of our Oracle
deployments. I dread patching our Oracle RDBMSes (yes Oracle does a lot more
than just DB, but this thread started out about the DB specifically). Some of
the Oracle patches go smoothly, some of them make me feel like I'm caught in a
Rube Goldberg machine.

I'm not a decision maker (well, not for RDBMS decisions anyway) where I work, so
I didn't decide to go with Oracle and for our purposes, I'm not sure why we're
using it. I think it had something to do with the fact that we could get
support for both the OS (RHELAS) and the DB from one vendor.

I have been working with Oracle as a DBA and programmer for four years now and
in that time it has been very reliable, but management is not painless. I've
been working on a product that I hope to take to the market one day and it runs
entirely on MySQL. I think it's ready for the enterprise, but that's only
because I've seen it working flawlessly for us in a high volume 24/7
environment.

One day I hope to get my hands dirty with PostgreSQL, but there's so little
time.

>   Oracle is really only necessary if you need to run a HUGE database
>   across multiple servers.  Otherwise, it's just a waste of money.

Ahh RAC, er Grid, er something... How does PostgreSQL cluster? Supposedly MySQL
has clustering support, but I don't know anyone that's tried it yet. I like the
idea of clustering Oracle DBs and repurposing different servers at different
times depending on current needs, but thus far we haven't needed it yet.

--
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com