Wow, this almost reads like a direct quote from MySQL marketing
literature. Like marketing literature, it's not necessarily untruthful,
but it does describe things selectively.
Terence M. Bandoian wrote:
I don't have a great deal of experience with Postgres but I have been
using MySQL since the days of mSQL and have found it to be fast,
reliable, easy to install on both Linux and Windows and straightforward
to administer.
Anecdotal, but no more so than anyone else's opinion. However, the
actual behaviour of MySQL and benchmarks contradict you. It's only fast
for queries using the MyISAM table type, and then only with few if any
joins. MyISAM means no foreign key constraints (the syntax supports
them, but they're ignored) and therefore no referential integrity. It's
unreliable - indexes aren't recreated when a column type is changed
(such as increasing the range of an integral type), whereas most other
database engines recreate them automatically. It may be easy to install
the binaries, but administering access and being sure you've locked it
down is hard.
It provides good support for the ANSI standard and the
No it doesn't. By default ANSI SQL support is poor, and many gotchas
exist (try Googling for "MySQL Gotchas").
documentation is good in identifying extensions to or deviations from
The documentation is poorly organised, incomplete (try finding
descriptions of all the InnoDB tuning parameters), and often misleading
when describing features MySQL lacks. Note how dismissive the
documentation on foreign key constraints and referential integrity was -
saying it should be handled in application code - until MySQL added
support for it ...
the standard. All of the basic tools, from query analysis to command
line administration programs, are documented and function reliably.
Statement syntax is very well documented. Features include
localization, various character sets (UTF-8 and Unicode), data
encryption, client/server encryption, stored procedures, triggers,
transactions, APIs for a number of programming languages and support for
ODBC, JDBC and .NET.
Localisation - full text indexes rely on a single stop list (with a
slightly dubious one for English compiled in) so you can only support
one language at a time without running into difficulty.
Transactions - only for the InnoDB table type, rolling back from a
transaction that has touched non-InnoDB tables will result in a warning,
and screwed data.
Configurability is provided mainly through some
250+ system variables which may be set at startup (on the command line
or in the options file) or dynamically with the SET statement. I have
been very pleased with its performance both administratively and as a
programmer and you can't beat the price.
Only some of those parameters can be changed dynamically, and not all of
them are documented. For instance, changing the minimum length of words
that are indexed in a full text index requires a restart. As mentioned
above, the documentation on tuning is incomplete and unhelpful, little
more than a couple of example mysql.conf files that contradict each
other and have few if any comments to describe what each parameter does.
-Terence M. Bandoian
MySQL encourages bad habits, and commonly adds to the bugginess of PHP
applications where MySQL is the de-facto standard for persistence. I'd
strongly recommend you try another database engine such as PostgreSQL or
Firebird, and compare MySQL for performace, scalability and standards
conformance.
Chris
--
Chris Wareham
Senior Software Engineer
Visit London Ltd
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