The first stable version of mySQL in the 4.x branch is now available, version 4.0.12.
MySQL 4.0.12 Declared ‘Production Ready’
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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MySQL is awesome. I’ve used it lots of database driven websites and for various other projects. It doesn’t overload my laptop when like Oracle does with bloat.
Best of all, MySQL is pure GPL … Which is _the_ best end user license.
Congratulations to all that have worked on making MySQL work so well.
Is:
– triggers
– stored procedures
– transactions
– commit/rollback
– better connection handling so that the database won’t (which it currently does) crash when large amount of sim. connections are made.
Just to name a few implemented yet … if not – my clients will have to continue using Postgres
everyone knows there are only three good databases, Oracle, DB2, and MSSQL. open source databases = CRAP! whenever anyone mentions using mysql all people do is laugh. all professionals use oracle, or MSSQL on windows.
Ouch… The Flames are going to hurt (but I had to do it!)
————
MSSQL … stuck using Microsoft platform (vendor lock-in is not an option!)
Oracle – extremely bloated for normal use (except very large enterprise use plus most tools and third party tools suck with the exception of SQL Navigator) … Also I’ve used SQL*Plus and HATE IT!!!
DB2 – never used… AFAIK supposedly a great DB but I can’t back that up.
MySQL – is a perfect choice for a lot of small to medium projects (and even big ones where speed is more important than some wizz-bang features)
I can do without stored procedures… especially since MySQL supports cached queries
Also, I don’t have a clue what MySQL will use for its Stored Procedure language but it will just be more bloat… I hope they will add it as an option at compile time
Also, I avoid using Triggers (slow) and they’re not always reliable… nice concept but MySQL isn’t hurting because they don’t have it IMHO!!!
As someone pointed out on osnews last week, Firebird is a great full-featured RDBMS. I hadn’t looked at it since it went open-source, and boy was I surprised. For a measly 3meg install you get transactions, referential integrity, generators (ie sequences), and good tool support. It’s worth checking out if you need PostgreSQL’s features but want to run it on Windows.
A lot of people are talking about http://www.sapdb.org (the old ‘Adabas’ – it came on Star Office 5 database limited to 100 mbytes).
On Slashdot people talked much about postgres has a threat to big wizz RDBMS like Oracle, but not mysql (poor transaction handling, bla, bla).
I love mysql for small (and rarely medium) size RDBMS; 99% of the times for websites on shared hosting (you can’t find much postgres on low budget hosting). It’s fast ! The mysql (0.8.10 beta) GUI is also very confortable to work. And it’s free.
New features ??
Today I have to install an Oracle client/server environment.
– 1 Server
– 3 Clients.
I wonder how mysql would install for this type of installation. Oracle takes just way too long to install. Oh yeah, we’re using Oracle 8i. I don’t know if that matters.
Yahoo! Finance, Motorola, NASA, Silicon Graphics, and Texas Instruments : those are places where MySQL is used and they sound like professionals to me. Which company do you work for ? Did your boss check if Timeline won’t sue you in relation to the MS SQL Server licenses case ?
Sometimes I really wonder, if ppl come to calm thinking. We heard that crap over and over again. Today’s desktop PC is magnitude faster than some yesterday servers might be, and yet we still hear the same kind of arguments – this or that is not robust enough, is a toy, and can’t compare to big guys db-stuff etc.
… and I thought that the decision should be made upon the kind of problem we are trying to solve 🙂 Will I go for Oracle, if all I need is some thosands to tens of thousands of records? We e.g. bought Advantage datebase server (http://www.advantagedatabase.com) for our Novell server, it uses plain old .dbf files and I can tell you, that we may run circles around other dbs – the price, support, .dbf legacy, speed of db, extreme efficiency of db, speed of deployment – it was a win win for us. So, should we go for Oracle or DB2 just because other way we are not cool enough? 🙂
Today’s IT world is screwed big way … full of consultants selling you so called “professional robust” solutions where ROI is very arguable …
cheers,
-pekr-
I am sure that once I read that NASA is shifting their datas from Oracle to MySQL. If it were crap, then it would mean u r more cleverer than whole stuff at NASA.
Congratulations ,”genius”
.
I think, the sentence: ” MySQL is crap” is a crap itself.
“DB2 – never used… AFAIK supposedly a great DB but I can’t back that up.”
Can’t back that up? It’s easy! I have some scripts which should back the whole thing for you!
;o)
J.
I don’t think that MYSQL is to be called crap. Unless it has a re.p to destroy data or give wrong results, which has never happened to me, yet. It is very good at what it CAN do. Key word CAN. If your planning to use it for website, simple software, storage of data, or anything straight forward, it does the job.
But if your building a software that requires Transactions, Triggers, or Stored Procedure (To store Business Rules), to my knowledge it doesn’t seem to support that.
But these features I’m sure will be done eventually. Until then I use Firebird for free database.
BTW, The fact that NASA uses it or not, does not make it better or worst. NASA also uses WINDOWS. It depends in what department within NASA your talking about.
Does MySQL handle locking and transactions properly yet?
This isn’t a flame – I really don’t know. I hope it does because this would help a LOT in the uptake.
I’ve used a great many datbabases over the years, and have been finding the OSS databases to be much more production ready these days, than even a year or two ago.
Right now I have two oracle installations running on two sun servers, each with multiple instances running. This is tremendous overkill for our needs, but is needed due to client requirements. The speed is reasonable, but its complexity is just irritating.
DB2 is reasonably complex to setup and manage as well. MSSQL is pretty quick to setup, but it has never really gained my trust after working with it on a few projects.
One database I did like, since it was reasonably simple to setup and rock solid, was Informix Dynamic Server. Sadly, they are no more effectively.
To me, the large vendors need to make a small scale “workgroup” version of their DB. If Oracle had a product as easy to setup as Postgres/MySql, it would sell wonderfully. Imagine SQL compatibility and the ability to scale your application to higher level products as needs increased. Since this would savage their sales though, they are never going to do that.
I used to use Postgres, but now that MySQL has gotten much better on transactional control, Java support, and these enterprise-level features, I find it hard to justify using anything else.
(Of course, one of the fastest DB’s I’ve used have been things like HSQL or InstantDB, since they run within the Java VM and in-memory cache. If you can get away with their limitations, they are absolutely wonderful.)
To me, the large vendors need to make a small scale “workgroup” version of their DB. If Oracle had a product as easy to setup as Postgres/MySql, it would sell wonderfully. Imagine SQL compatibility and the ability to scale your application to higher level products as needs increased. Since this would savage their sales though, they are never going to do that.
Oracle has Personal Oracle, but I think that’s PC only, and frankly don’t think it makes it dramatically easier to install or maintain.
Sybase has SQLAnywhere. I think it’s cross platform, but I don’t know how it can be installed.
SQLBase is a nice little database, but it’s Windows only.
InterBase is very nice as well, and its cross platform. I’ve not seen what Firebird has done with it.
I think IBM should sell Informix SE for $199 on Linux boxes, with ESQL-C. That’s a fabulous little database. I just wish it handled BLOBs. SE is absolutely painless to install. Informix DS is only slightly more difficult to install (mostly dealing with getting shared memory configured). Informix always worked really well right out of the box will little tweaking necessary to be functional.
>BTW, The fact that NASA uses it or not, does not make it
>better or worst. NASA also uses WINDOWS. It depends in what
>department within NASA your talking about.
I do not care what people do/don’t use at NASA .Even if they use WINDOWS, so what? What’s ur point here?
One schould get one thing: It is clear that the NASA people wouldn”t chose and use MySQL over a hell of number of other databases, if it were a crap.They must have seen some good reasons for that. Isn’t it understandable?
I’ve been using SAPDB 7.4 for the last few months. It is a viable, open source enterprise RDBMS with support for a lot of the things MySQL is missing: stored procedures, views, triggers, etc. http://www.sapdb.org/
From http://www.mysql.com/
“The InnoDB storage engine is now offered as a feature of the standard MySQL server, including full support for transactions, foreign keys, and row-level locking.”
Everyone seems to think MySQL cannot handle huge databases the way others like Oracle and DB2 can. It can handle as big a database as you can throw at it.
Handles large databases. We are using MySQL Server with some databases that contain 50 million records and we know of users that use MySQL Server with 60,000 tables and about 5,000,000,000 rows.
That is a quote from here:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Features.html
There are academic projects which use mySQL. I’m not sure about elsewhere in the world, but in England (and maybe Wales), there is very little funding available from the AHRB (and, formerly, the British Academy). Savings have to be made where possible, so it is often cheaper to use open source where the option exists due to licensing issues.
MySQL is great at what it can do. For absolutely nothing you can get some great things like:
* excellent stability
* excellent scalability
* relatively straightforward install and maintenance
* multi-platform
Then, what makes it all-around a great thing is:
* multi-(human) lanuage support
(from many sources including offical docs, and newsgroups postings from a large user population), so solving problems is less of a problem.
* multi-(programming) language support
* and a good bet this project will be around a very long time (which is something to consider when chosing a database, in my opinion.)
Let’s not get too religious over this. Software is a tool. If your requirements of a database match the featureset that MySQL offers, it is definately worth a close look.
Yes, MySQL is great at what it can do. You’ll get no argument from me in regards to its speed, robustness, size capability, etc…
I have to laugh at the focus of most of the arguments here from both sides, though. I am continually surprised at how many educated tech people don’t really know what a relational database management system really IS or why that is important.
For example, try reading the following forum exchange on MySQL/Oracle, and see the difference in focus: http://www.webmaster-forum.net/viewtopic.php?t=133
So, if you are only arguing for Oracle (or whatever DBMS) based on such things as size/scaleability/availability, etc… then of course, Oracle is only meaningful for very large systems, and MySQL is good for all others.
If, however, you are arguing based on _logical_ capability to constrain, maintain, and manipulate your data, as well as support business rules, then the focus of the argument has to shift dramatically. In that sense one could arguably say that the even Microsoft Access supports more relational capability than MySQL. (and that is something I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again). Not that I favor Access in any way, but I’m just making a point: when evaluating a DBMS , there are TWO major dimensions by which to judge a DBMS, not just one: 1) performance and 2) logical capability. I feel that MySQL scores fairly high on 1, but is still way behind the curve on point 2. (I am including availability, scaleability, etc… along with performance, thus performance doesn’t just mean speed)
Again, this is totally fine, if the application you are using doesn’t need advanced logical management, then MySQL will do the job. However, it might behoove some budding application developers to acquaint themselves with just _what_ they are missing, before making these decisions. (Try reading C.J. Date’s “Introduction to Database Systems”, for example)