Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Quote of the Week



Relational databases ... had poisoned whole generation of programmers thinking (incl. me). With no clue we approached everything through relational prism that we studied in university. MySQL was the only OSS alternative that cut enough corners to make relational DBMS fit the problems we tried to solve. For which the relational paradigm wasn't a good fit anyways.

So. then comes along the NoSQL stuff and you find out that you have much better tools than relational for these kinds of problems (simple websites, blogging sites, feed sites, social sites, etc.). Along the way you might see all the other problems that really need realational (ERP systems etc.). But now you need real relational not some half-baked all corners cut MySQL stuff. Yeah that also goes for InnoDB which might have become something if Oracle hadn't freezed it.

Then you try out Postgres (because it's free) and when it works for big workloads (yes it does in skilled hands) then you are hooked. If by chance you then check out Oracle ... it feels like a twelve ton dinosaur ("erm. no boolean type? whaat - implicit commit with DDL?"). If by any miracle you don't have the 1% of projects that need something special - Oracle RAC or Spatial or whatnot. Then Postgre is the most mainstream option available - there just is no other as popular, as functional and as cheap solution for these kinds of problem domains that really require relational DBMS.

PS: been using MySQL (both MyISAM/InnoDB) over 10 years, PostgreSQL over 5 years and Oracle over 5 years. --Hipsters Hacking on PosgreSQL, theRegister.com

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