Let's see if I can convince your managers:
1. Support
Oracle offers support, this is true, but if you want pay for support, you can
buy it from MySQL AB. They have MySQL for free and they also have a licence
you can buy and ask for support. If you want to keep free, this list is a
good point for support. All messages posted here are answered. Some times you
have strange answers, but you have of course ability to filter good ones.
2. Correcting bugs
With Oracle, you have some programmers working on it to develop and keep it
out of bugs. MySQL is free software, that means we have thousands or
programmers around the world contributing with it. In free software world,
almost all time, when a hacker find a bug in a software, he already give a
solution to it, because he has free access to source code, meaning he can fix
bug and contribute to software development.
3. Improvements
I can use the same argument for correcting bugs. MySQL is free software. If I
have enouth knowledgement to develop subqueries, I can make it work and
contribute with software. If maintainers of MySQL approve it, it is
distributed together with MySQL. See case of foreign keys and transaction
support. When I started with MySQL, they did not have even plans to develop
this and suddenly we have support for transactions and foreign keys. How
could it happen? INNODB and Berkeley DB, contributed software.
So if you want capability to develop improvement, MySQL is a better choice.
4. Thid part support
If you do not want Oracle support, you of course may want some else's
support. We have people that offers support for Oracle products, but how
many? And how much will they ask for their support?
MySQL is becoming (I think it is already) default database in free software
world. All Linux distributions you buy or download, offers MySQL as default
database and PostgreSQL as the second choice. Because of this, we have more
preople working with MySQL. If someone will offer support but it's expensive,
it is easy to find someone else to help you with lower price.
5. Easy of use
Once, I tried to work with a lite version of Oracle, but I could not even
install it, because of its hardware requirements. Later I bought a new
computer, but I still could not install it. In installation, I had to have
some knowledgements of Oracle.
I tried to work wit PostgreSQL, and difficult came after instalation. I could
not easily understand its security issues, and it's interface for programming
language would require some hard study to put it to work.
With MySQL, as I installed it, it was ready to work. Simply reading tutorial
in documentation I could already create databases, users, tables and put it
to work for me. Also interface with programming language is much easier to
understand. And if you have MS-Access as front-end, you can easily link MySQL
tables to it and work as it was Access's tables. You can do all of it without
much previous knowledgement.
So if you want fast learning, and development, MySQL is your choice.
Want more? I could give you more arguments, but I think this should be enough.
Hope I could help you.
Anderson Pereira Ataides
anderson.pa@stripped
