Re: Select count(*) in Oracle and MySQL

On Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:03:29 +0200, sybrandb wrote:

> MySQL aficionados probably don't read documentation and don't care about
> transaction safety.
> Likely MySQL will *never* come out of the Kindergarten.

MySQL is out of the kindergarten. MySQL is very good for small data warehouses. Computationally, it is cheaper then Oracle as it uses native data types. Type INT covers +/-2GB and consumes 4 bytes. All arithmetic is done natively. You can specify "EGNINE=" clause in create database and even create table and store your data in memory or in MYISAM engine. MySQL has a very small footprint and is definitely not a transactional database like Oracle or PostgreSQL. Even with InnoDB engine, now owned by Oracle, MySQL is miles away from a satisfactory business solution. What pisses me off with MySQL are endless possibilities to ignore errors. On the other hand, if you have a MS-Access database on a file server, shared by several users, MySQL is far more then what you need. Also for the not-so-small databases which are mostly read-only, MySQL can be much faster then Oracle. I know of an example with the database being 200GB in size.
MySQL is not suitable for a massive OLTP solution. PostgreSQL can be. In my opinion, that is a good thing.

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