11:55 pm, 20 Apr 05
mysql haters
A response I just wrote to an email from
mattm:
It's always interesting to read MySQL haters. I think they don't really get what Real People use it for. There are tons of applications that just want to store structured data and retrieve it quickly and these people miss that. At least for LJ, the serious (as in not scalably fixable by throwing more hardware it at) bottlenecks were the databases, so having them as stupid and fast as possible was crucial; if anything, we migrated the SQL to less fancy queries over time -- removing e.g. SORT BYs from slow queries -- and so having the database support subselects, transactions, etc. was ultimately uninteresting.
It's always interesting to read MySQL haters. I think they don't really get what Real People use it for. There are tons of applications that just want to store structured data and retrieve it quickly and these people miss that. At least for LJ, the serious (as in not scalably fixable by throwing more hardware it at) bottlenecks were the databases, so having them as stupid and fast as possible was crucial; if anything, we migrated the SQL to less fancy queries over time -- removing e.g. SORT BYs from slow queries -- and so having the database support subselects, transactions, etc. was ultimately uninteresting.
I hate MySQL because I wish it were less like fancy relational databases, not more. Why am I building strings containing code in some horrible COBOL variant, when what I want is just a few steps above what BerkeleyDB does?