evan_tech -- mysql haters

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.

brad	Uh, well, nowadays we use InnoDB everywhere because it's faster, but it's also durable, which we love. The transcations: not so much. But it comes in useful in a number of places where we had 3rd party lock managers / arbitrators before.
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lithiana	hmm. i'm not a mysql hater, but... the most annoying problems i have with mysql aren't related to its support of SQL (which is what most people seem to criticise), but rather things like accepting updates but discarding binlog data if the log disk is full. it seems like standard sane design is missing in places.
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jeffr	mysql is a great example of 'worse is better'.
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confuseme

Yeah, the best thing about MySQL is that it does so little -- it solves more people's problems by trying to do less. A lot of the traditional sexy relational database features are irrelevant to many modern applications on modern hardware. Scalability for web sites in particular is mostly about distributing the load across an increasing number of machines over time, rather than buying one monster machine. Everyone sort of builds their own distributed database on top of MySQL to accomplish that, and I think MySQL is probably a better choice for that job than Postgres or SQL Server.

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?

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Anonymous
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confuseme	No, I don't use BDB for the kind of thing people use MySQL for -- I do the pragmatic thing and use MySQL. Like I said, what I need is a few steps above what BDB does.
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Anonymous

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- evan This is exactly the issue I was pointing out: you're the sort of person who makes the comparison.
  
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Anonymous

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- evan Did you even read my post?
  
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zanfur krow would probably like to hear that (he's head architect/dev of MySQL).

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- evan i know brian. :)
  
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  - zanfur Figured you might :-)
    
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evan	This is exactly the issue I was pointing out: you're the sort of person who makes the comparison.
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zanfur	krow would probably like to hear that (he's head architect/dev of MySQL).
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evan	Did you even read my post?
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zanfur	Figured you might :-)
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