Michael She wrote:
The gravity is a great analogy. It works with databases too. People are confident in gravity because it is an observable fact of our planet. For millennia people have experienced gravity and have grown accustomed to it. The same can be said of DB2 and Oracle. People have been using it for years, hence the comfort level with these products.
People have been using databases for years. Some of them were produced by Oracle Corp or IBM. However, many people have _not_ directly used Oracle or IBM DB2 that are entering or currently in the database market. They have used products built on those engines and have certain levels of faith in those engines but have to consider the DBA's involvement as well as any support contracts with Oracle or IBM that kept the software running as it was, as well as Oracle and IBM's tendancies to recommend specific (very high-end and fault-tolerant) hardware.
MySQL is another iteration of the database engine by another group of people. This group of people may or may not be 'new' to database design, just as the people currently working on Oracle 10 (or X?) may be freshmen in college (for all I know, but I highly doubt it). People have faith in Oracle or IBM because they have chosen to have that faith, often on the basis of their high marketing profiles, not on the basis of hard facts or evidence.
I'm not saying that Oracle and IBM don't make good DB products. They certainly make some of the best software in the world, but don't have faith in any software product just because you've heard its name a lot. OpenBSD and Linux were helping run the majority of the Internet long before most people had heard either name.
--
Michael T. Babcock
C.T.O., FibreSpeed Ltd.
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Before posting, please check:
http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual)
http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive)
To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
