On Mon, 19 Apr 2004, Stormblade wrote: > Ok. Love MySQL and I will be using it for my personal use and recommending > it to clients as a lower cost alternative. I've only been using it for a > very short time but there one major gripe I have with it and I believe it's > just a design thing. > > MySQL seems to put the burden of error checking and such on the client. > > - All fields have a default value even when I don't tell it to? > - Allow Null will only result in an error if I explicitly try to set the > field to null. > > These are the two things that I really dislike. I think it's a poor design > to rely on clients only for error checking. MySQL supports foreign keys. > This is good because the database handles referential integrity. But it > shouldn't stop there. I should also be able to tell the database not to > allow a field to be empty/null and it should not put anything in there that > I have not told it to.
Yup, it is a bad idea, and thankfully it seems to be slowly improving as more and more people try to use mysql as a more serious database. However, keep in mind that it is not an adhoc arbitrary decision, but it based on a very fundamental traditional mysql design fundamental: not to support transactions because they aren't required most of the time, or so the claim goes. While there are a few mysql storage engines now that do support transactions, and at least one is in widespread use, this history explains why it is the way it is. If you don't support transactions, what do you do if you are running a statement that updates multiple rows and get an error with one row? If you just abort the whole statement, it is really ugly since then you leave the statement half executed. If you try to be able to undo the entire statement, it is really ugly because without transactions you are unlikely to have the backend support for doing that or for avoiding dirty reads, etc.... since that is one of the fundamentals of what a transaction is. So ... you bravely soldier on. -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
