from __future__ import *

Kailash and Friends Kailash Kher Kaipa

It seems that most of my gripes about MySQL boil down to three things:

1. It sucks if your recent previous experience is with more capable SQL databases. I actually learned SQL using MySQL back in 1997 or whatever, but it was using hardcopy literature written for the ANSI standard... so I'd write SQL with views, subselects, and whatnot, and curse MySQL for not having the features I thought I wanted. Once I moved on to the PostgreSQL/MSSQL/Oracle stuff I knew that I actually did want those features.

   I think the last project I used MySQL on was in 1998 or 1999. Everything since has been other databases, but I decided to try MySQL this time around. I decided to give it another shot because I know some people running high volume stuff on MySQL, I had met a couple respectable people working for MySQL over the years, I thought it would be fast (it's not -- what we really need is materialized views, and I had to write a daemon to poll the database to implement them), and I knew I wouldn't have to spend much time setting it up. I think this was a premature optimization, and I'm pretty sure that something else would've been faster anyway now that I have a feel for what MySQL is and isn't good at (read: our stuff).

   I know that a lot of this is being fixed in MySQL 5, but damned if I'm going to use a beta database that has hundreds of new features that haven't ever been in the wild. I also have a feeling that it's probably full of legacy brain damage like PHP 5, even though it tries to suck significantly less.

2. It broke in two different ways in one week, after having used it for only about two months. Granted, we're putting a lot of stress on it, but you expect a database that's been around this long to at least gracefully degrade into getting slow, rather than throwing data away. The first two months were nice, but I have a feeling that other people are experiencing this crap later on in the game, and are simply just screwed because they have too much of an investment in their MySQL-based code. It's painful to migrate a couple million rows no matter how you slice it, but I have better things to do than babysit a database.

   We have our own flat file transaction log now, so I'm not so worried about MySQL dying again during the transition :)

3. The MySQL GUI tools are really weird and buggy and/or out of date on OS X. They're almost good enough, but tend to crash or have weird UI quirks. Who the hell decided to remove the select all option from the edit menus? I put them back in with Interface Builder, but I feel sorry for people who don't have Cocoa experience :) This is only a somewhat valid complaint, because most of the other RDBMS don't really have GUI tools for OS X. Also, the performance/health monitoring graphs in the administrator are just totally worthless, because they adjust the scale once a second, and most of the time it's not even done correctly so the peaks get clipped. It looks cool, but man is that graph useless.

So long, and thanks for all the marketing buzz.