1 Dec
2003
1 Dec
'03
4:43 p.m.
On Mon, Dec 01, 2003 at 10:27:22PM -0500, J.C. Wren wrote:
mySQL may be free, and it is an excellent product,
but other than in speed
for simple transactions, you can hardly compare them. mySQL does not support
triggers, nested JOINs (as of about 2 months ago), proper foreign keys, nor a
handful of other slightly esoteric but frequently used database methods.
I use mySQL for all my database work. But then, the DB stuff I do is pretty
straight forward, and I rarely need anything more than it offers. I've
messed briefly with postGres, which is verra nice, but was just too different
to make worth switching.
Oracle is expensive. But it's a lot more database than mySQL will be for a
few more years.
MySQL should not be used, unless unavoidable, since there is an open
source RDBMS which is a lot better: PostgreSQL. For starters, it _is_ a
full RDBMS: Fully SQL92 compliant (and partially SQL99, working on it),
supporting triggers, rules, stored procedures, transactions, nested
queries, several programming languages for stored procedures (currently
PL/pgSQL, Perl, Tcl, Python), is very stable (pull the plug during
insert/update and the database _will_ recover, you'll just lose
transactions open during the power failure since the'll be rolled back),
works well under load (many users during insert/update/complex queries).
The last version 7.4 which was released a short time ago was again
seriously speeded up. And yes, it works for large databases - terabyte
sized instances have been seen.
I'm using PostgreSQL since a few years (playing with MySQL before that)
and I'm very satisfied with it. Also used it for the database in my
diploma thesis - MySQL would simply have not been up to it.
http://www.postgresql.org/presskit/en/presskit74.php
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison