

The Decline of MySQL? - mariuz
http://www.geekgumbo.com/2010/11/06/the-decline-of-mysql/

======
PaulHoule
Hegemonies don't end because they get weak, they end because something else
gets stronger.

Oracle's been doing good work at the boring task of making mysql work better
on large multiprocessor machines. They've done a lot more to improve mysql
than Sun ever did. (For that matter, Oracle's finally putting lambdas into
Java too...)

Postgresql is catching up, but like the Python and Ruby programmers who whine
about PHP, team Postgresql has never seriously asked the question of why MySQL
has had more market traction than Postgresql. (HINT: it's not just hype, for
many people, MySQL was the product they wanted)

And then there is the whole half-baked NoSQL peanut gallery.

You can point to some success stories but if you pick the average NoSQL
product and have run-of-the-mill results you might experience spending 8
months building a product and then discovering the performance sucks with any
number of servers. Or getting a phone call Saturday evening from the CTO like
"Dude, where's my data?"

I wanted to like mongodb, it's got a beautiful design and even some funding --
on paper it's the closest thing to a company that could take on MySQL.

But then there was the terrible sprint where I rebuilt something I'd built in
MySQL, and despite mongodb supposedly having the correct kind of index,
queries in mongodb took 20 sec where MySQL took 0.03 sec.

The competition isn't quite ready yet.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_(HINT: it's not just hype, for many people, MySQL was the product they
wanted)_

Just curious, could you explain what it is that people want from MySQL that
they don't get from Postgres?

I (and another team member) recently moved a big project from MySQL to
Postgres due to deadlocks, failure to respect constraints and similar issues,
but I'm curious what I might be giving up.

So far the main thing I miss is is "UPDATE foo INNER JOIN bar ON
foo.id=bar.foo_id SET foo.x={x}, bar.y={y}...".

~~~
veyron
It's not really a functionality issue. MySQL just works.

The PHP API is incredibly direct and there's little development overhead.

Postgres on the other hand always felt kludgy for small projects. Just getting
it up and running and creating databases took longer than with mysql. And
phpMyAdmin is a tool most people are familiar with, for which I can't even
think of the postgres analogue.

Pardon my butchering of the phrase but postgres is a hammer and mysql is a
scalpel, and most projects call for a scalpel.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Compare:

    
    
        $ sudo aptitude install mysql-server
        $ echo "CREATE DATABASE dbname;" | mysql
    
        $ sudo aptitude install postgresql-9.1
        $ createdb -U postgres dbname
    
        mysql_query("SELECT * FROM foo...");
    
        pg_query($db_handle, "SELECT * FROM foo...");
    

<http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql/4>

[http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-use-php-
wit...](http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/howdoi/how-do-i-use-php-with-
postgresql/110)

I haven't used phpMyAdmin, so I won't comment on that.

------
BenjieGillam

      Error establishing a database connection
    

Complements the post title perfectly :)

------
alttag
One of the things that won't change immediately, but will change over the long
term is the availability of people familiar with MySQL.

With the cost structure described in the article, MySQL will start
disappearing from university database courses. I used it when I taught
databases. (It's bad enough that some of them use Access, but at least MySQL
was supported for most.) This is double trouble, as MySQL Workbench was an
introductory tool for many database features.

This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting their
software in schools, and why Microsoft has done the same this century at the
university level. Software is a "gateway drug", and Oracle may be killing
that.

~~~
larrys
"This is the reason (IMNSHO) Apple spent so much money in the 90s putting
their software in schools"

I've known that to be the case as well. I was able to find this to back up the
point that you make:

<http://www.marketingapple.com/>

 _"In the late 1980s, shortly after Steve launched the original Macintosh he
faced a similar problem to the one we were facing ten years later. Very few
developers were interested in building software for a platform that was much
smaller than the standard at the time (in 1987 it was MS-DOS, in 1997 it was
Windows). Steve’s answer was simple: encourage higher education institutions
to build software for the platform and hook students on the Macintosh, which
they would later bring to their jobs after graduation. The AUC worked
exceedingly well then, and so I suggested to Steve that we rebuild a similar
program, and he emphatically agreed."_

~~~
gaius
Counterpoint: Acorn.

------
Zash
How is this news?

    
    
        Posted on November 6, 2010

~~~
taligent
Well since mariuz is the developer for some Firebird admin tool (another open
source database) I'm going to take a guess that spreading FUD about the most
popular open source database is good business.

~~~
mariuz
We all knew that oracle mysql branch will go closed source and this is about
that old prediction with the fact that now it really happens heroku is on
postgresql engineyard is on postgresql can you spot some pattern here ? people
started to leave mysql it's true that at a slower pace
[http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-
de...](http://www.engineyard.com/blog/2012/postgresql-is-our-new-default/)

the most popular ? hmm i think the sqlite is more popular with more deploys at
least on mobiles : android,ios ...

------
anuraj
Had been using mysql for 8 years. The product has improved over the years, and
is still very simple to use. It would take a compelling reason for me to move
to Postgresql. And right now, I don't see any. I want shit done!

~~~
slurgfest
Because nobody 'gets shit done' in Postgresql...

------
emiliobumachar
> "As part of European Agreement, Oracle will maintain MySQL dual licensing
> until 2015."

> "Oracle also striped out some of the capabilities from the MySQL Open Source
> version, like the NDB storage engine, for example, and now charges for
> this."

Can they do this? Dumb it down before 2015?

If they can, what would stop them from striping out more and bigger
capabilities, effectively killing the Open Source version while maintaining
dual licensing on paper?

------
philip1209
I do not think that MySQL will be in decline until PostgreSQL has a suitable
cross-platform GUI that doesn't cost $80. It is easy to manage MySQL due to
programs like PhpMyAdmin and Sequel Pro, but PostgreSQL lacks such software.
While the early adopter crowd has long since moved away from MySQL, at the
moment the software is too easy for more general users to abandon.

~~~
samgranieri
really? have you ever tried PgAdmin?

~~~
philip1209
I tried using it, but it was quite a rigmarole to get it to work with Heroku.

------
fields
This page gave me an error connecting to the database. Ironic twist, or was
there some other point?

~~~
gklitt
I'm guessing this wasn't intentional, but it was still a good laugh.

~~~
foxhop
f5

------
Lasher
Hard to comment on this and not sound like a "hater", but wasn't the decline
of MySQL as an open source solution pretty much inevitable the second Oracle
acquired it? Oracle have handed other open source DB providers a gift, let's
hope they make the most of it.

------
kiplinger
Wp MySQL error. Lol

