Hi Elizabeth,
The first question I would ask why don't you want Oracle? If you can't come up with a good
business reason why your company shouldn't go with Oracle I would say you have already
lost the battle. The second question is who is making the purchasing decision? If it's
middle management or the bean counters then you have pretty well lost again because
nobody ever lost their job for buying Oracle.
Oracle has a number of advantages that make it a very safe purchasing decision; it's a
market leader, it's widely supported, it's robust, it scales well, and it comes with a
full suite of development and deployment tools. The only weakness Oracle has is its price
tag. And the price goes beyond the cost of the database. Oracle's development tools are
pricey, a large hardware platform is needed to support not only the production box but
also developers workstations and, if you are doing a client/server deployment, the end
users machines. Also the price of a good Oracle DBA and development team is fairly steep.
MySQL on the other hand is fairly inexpensive over all. There is no special training
required in order to set up an instance and start playing. It can be easily integrated
with a number of scripting languages giving your development team a boost in performance.
It also has a very small footprint. Our production box is a PIII 800 with 256MB of RAM
running Linux as the OS. We have over 100 users and over 100 tables and we have not yet
had any performance issues. MySQL also has a very responsive support staff and a mailing
list chock full of talented people who like answering questions ;)
MySQL also has what some people consider fairly serious drawbacks. MySQL does not support
triggers or foreign key constraints (yet) so data integrity is always at risk. There is
no equivalent of PL/SQL in MySQL, all database procedures etc. must be written in a 3GL,
such as C, and then linked in.
If you feel your shop should become a MySQL shop I suggest you look at the business
reasons why and use those reasons to argue your case for you. Technical coolness or
altruistic support of the open source movement doesn't cut it with most managers.
Productivity, cost, and support usually does.
John Griffin
-----Original Message-----
From: Elizabeth Bogner [mailto:elizabeth.bogner@stripped]
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 10:25 PM
To: mysql@stripped
Subject: MySQL vs. Oracle (not speed)
A company I work with is in the process of upgrading its databases from
some
motheaten system to something current. My impression is that they
want to go with Oracle, and I'm not sure if this is based on anything
other than being impressed with the size and presumed quality support
of Oracle. I'd like to encourage them to at least seriously consider
using
MySQL instead.
I don't think that speed is a huge factor here; we do a lot of XML
publishing
and content management, but at most we'd have several gigabytes of
data and several dozen simultaneous users, so well within the
capabilities
of MySQL. I've looked at various things I could find, like the benchmarks
pages (probably not relevant) and the MySQL myths page, which was
somewhat helpful, but I couldn't find anything more along the lines of
"How to Convince my Management to go with MySQL." I don't even know
what to expect from them, but I'm imagining they'll say, "But MySQL
doesn't support sub-selects," to which I can reply, "But you can write
most of those as joins anyway, so it won't matter because the software
will all be written from scratch." Etc.
Are there pointers anyone can give me?
E. Bognewitz
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Before posting, please check:
http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual)
http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive)
To request this thread, e-mail <mysql-thread117260@stripped>
To unsubscribe, e-mail <mysql-unsubscribe-John.Griffin=pwgsc.gc.ca@stripped>
Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
