MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com is running a lengthy look at MySQL - both the software and the company. "Travel reservations provider Sabre Holdings has replaced the mainframe computer and high-end Unix servers that underpinned its customer-facing Web site with about 45 Intel servers running a variety of open-source software, including Linux and MySQL. Going to a 'farm' of multiple relatively cheap servers has saved the company millions of dollars in database licenses alone, according to company executives."

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MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 17:37 UTC (Wed) by mmajczyk (guest, #19089) [Link]

it disappoints me that mysql gained greater popularity than postgres, imho, a far
superior database & a much better replacement for oracle. postgres offers a
slew of native data types, including boolean, money, and many date-time and
numeric types. postgres handles subqueries in a query which mysql does not.
postgres offers foreign keys & check constraints. don't even get me started on
mysql's support for transaction processing. does mysql yet support languages
for writing stored procedures or user-defined data types? i guess mysql is a bit
easier to setup, & if you're not really doing anything advanced, i guess it works.
as for me (and the office), we'll be sticking w/ postgres.

MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 18:18 UTC (Wed) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

I agree, but you can't really argue with success. Perhaps MySQL's ease of operation is a big advantage? PostgreSQL is practically inoperable.

MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 19:10 UTC (Wed) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link]

I wouldn't call postgres inoperable. We have an entry level admin here who runs a postgres data warehouse, pulling it's main data feed from Oracle. He seems to deal with it just fine.

MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 19:52 UTC (Wed) by mmajczyk (guest, #19089) [Link]

I agree, but you can't really argue with success. Perhaps MySQL's ease of operation is a big advantage? PostgreSQL is practically inoperable.

out of curiosity (i promise i'm not trolling), what parts did you find "inoperable"? i understand mysql "appeals to organizations looking for a database that is 'good enough' for most needs". i just wonder how difficult it will be to migrate to something else when those mysql admins realize that they need the power of a database similar to that of oracle...since i think that's what the article was trying to compare mysql to. just my 2 cents. :)

MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 14, 2004 20:50 UTC (Wed) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

An inevitable comment on a MySQL story. I expect that an organization
spending millions of dollars on this probably evaluated PostgreSQL as
well. That decision isn't made on technical merits alone (in which case
we probably wouldn't see SQL in the picture at all) but rather one of
future compatibility and maintenance costs.

As to why MySQL is more common than PostgreSQL, it is probably because it
came together with PHP (which has much worse technical merits, having had
contant security issues while being slower compared to, say, Perl) as a
concept -- all in a package with good tutorials which installed just as
easily on a win32 development box as on the server.

MySQL takes cue from the master (News.com)

Posted Apr 15, 2004 18:09 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

For those (like me) who were prone to get too excited about this story, (none of whom are apparently commenting :-), note that this is the website *only*; they haven't replaced the IBM mainframe cluster running (likely) IMS.

Yet.

:-)