I'm not against open source in any way shape or form! SOME of it is fantastic. But that doesn't mean I think that all open source products are great or even decent. Honestly it seems like a lot of them are pretty fruitless, and more the personal hobbies and indulgences of the developers than useful bits of software ( read: a few of my own open source projects that luckily never even went public ; ). MySQL obviously not included. I adopted Firefox literally the moment I discovered tabbed browsing back before IE had it and when any product ( open source or otherwise ) is good enough, I evangelize it like a Jehova's Witness ( that's a compliment, it's pretty impressive that they hit the streets on Saturdays just to spread some church ).
Like I said, I've loved and used MySQL for years, and am only now unlocking its deep, dirty secrets. Clearly, it can do plenty of things very well or well enough. So it's great ( or fine ) for a lot of projects / operations. Unfortunately, for the stuff I was doing, it really really struggled ( and was obliterated in comparative performance by SQL Server 2008 ). Unfortunately ( sorry Judah ), I can't go very deeply into the explicit details of what MySQL was struggling with because our implementation is pretty tightly bound to some closed-sourcey commercial / intellectual property even at the database level. I can say that generally speaking some general issues that MySQL exhibited were the inability to correctly determine its own best execution plans, leverage precisely-defined indexes even when explicitly directed to with SQL-level overrides, correctly negotiate certain types of subqueries and not do more work than it needed to ( which was pretty ridiculous, at one point we were using ColdFusion to mitigate MySQL's own self-inflicted overload by feeding simulated subquery results to other queries as parameters by relaying the results to and from CF ), and reliably join to the same table( s ) multiple times against different subsets of its data to create highly dynamic temporary composites. Its raw view performance was also pretty weak at a real scale. Another thing to mention ( since you mention the storage engine implementation in MySQL ) is that the issues we had were almost exclusively with the InnoDB storage engine ( the most popular transactional engine with support for foreign key cascades ), and we used a design that was very driven by automated referential integrity with foreign and composite keys, which some people see as a more contemporary, cutting-edgey approach. After our complete re-architecture ( which now relies on application-server management of most of the things we tried to let MySQL handle automatically ) and a mostly MyISAM table design, MySQL is performing much, much better. On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Jochem van Dieten <joch...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 1:40 PM, David McGuigan wrote: > >> Companies use open source ( and free ) software for a variety of > reasons. > >> Usually out of either stubbornness or a genetic allergy to Microsoft. > > > Most of the other Google apps though have seemed really slow to me ( and > > been down completely more times than I can count on one hand ). I use > Gmail, > > Calendar, their Spreadsheet/Docs, IM, etc. And the only app I've ever > really > > been impressed with of theirs is Chrome ( which is my favorite browser ). > > You use Chrome? So are you stubborn or allergic? > > Jochem > > > -- > Jochem van Dieten > http://jochem.vandieten.net/ > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:326061 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
