While MySQL being able to scale is nice and all, it's had serious problems with even keeping basic data integrity for the data people hand it... for decades.
This is the root of it all - for years and years MySQL was perfectly capable of doing the needful, but it shipped with default configurations that would do things like use "not_quite_really_UTF8" and "myisam_tables_please_no_acid".
If you knew enough to switch to innodb and "mysql_real_utf8_string" or whatever it was, you had a quite performant and stable system.
There have also been numerous horror stories where people discovered (after the fact) that MySQL wasn't storing their data as given, but instead internally silently converting it to some other format/type and storing that.
People that directly experienced this very thing will probably chime in to give examples (etc). :)
You hit the nail on the head, those were my top two complaints, but the rabbit hole goes deep.
It's not an exaggeration to say that trying to keep mysql from corrupting your data feels like a full-time job. Mysql in many ways, especially as used by massive social media companies early on was closer to a SQLish DSL for a non-transactional kv store than a "real" ACID database.
That's why "but it can do 70k rps" is just noise to someone. I don't care how fast it can lose my data.
I'm all for people needing to read the docs but man a database burns trust pretty fast when it's so easy to have it pretend to support transactions or pretend to support utf8.
That was my biggest gripe with it - at least back in the day. Back then it really felt like MySQL vs Postgres was a trade-off between 'easy but no guarantees on data integrity' and 'correct but operationally harder to manage'.
The gap has for sure closed in many areas but I still feel safer with Postgres today because there's been little reason for me to try MySQL again.
Can we restrict our discussion to the situation now. If default configs result in data corruption, that's an issue. If an older version in the past decade does, that's of less interest.
MySQL's default storage engine has been InnoDB -- a high-quality OLTP storage engine which is fully ACID compliant -- for thirteen years now.
Meanwhile MySQL's default settings have included strict sql_mode (giving a hard error on data type mismatches, overflows, etc) for eight years.
These have been available as non-default options for 20+ years, and larger MySQL users have long enabled them before they were defaults.
Yes, the defaults certainly should have changed earlier, especially re: strict sql_mode, I won't dispute that. However on the default storage engine side, the historical reasoning makes perfect sense: InnoDB and MySQL were owned by different companies. Oracle purchased the makers of InnoDB in 2005 and didn't purchase Sun (incl MySQL) until 2010. Once both products were owned by Oracle, they made InnoDB the default storage engine in the next major MySQL release that same year.
In any case, your claims of "decades of misleading marketing" about transactions is completely fictional. This simply did not happen for "decades" and has not been a discussion point of any sort for a very, very long time. Serious MySQL shops were never using MyISAM at scale in the first place.
You chose to come into a thread about MariaDB, you wrote some verifiably factually incorrect statements about MySQL, and then you complain about not having the energy to discuss further?
I took time out of my Sunday to write a fact-based rebuttal to your false claims in this thread. The dates in my comment are all verifiable on Wikipedia, among other places. And yet your response is childish repetition, followed by a citationless comment claiming that my own comment was misinformation.
Since you're a Golang enthusiast (as am I), perhaps I can reframe this in a more relatable way. Imagine that it's the year 2035, and there's an HN thread about Golang. Some Go-hater chimes in that no one should ever trust Go because of decades of misleading marketing ("no one needs generics!"), GOPATH being stupid, and lack of a module dependency system. What would your response to this be in 2035, knowing full well that these issues were far in the past and that the claim of "decades" is at best an extreme exaggeration?
A decade is 10 years. Plural decades means 20 or more years.
You claimed MySQL made decades of misleading marketing about transactions. That would mean they were making such statements in 2015 or later.
That is verifiably factually incorrect, considering that InnoDB (a fully ACID-compliant storage engine) was made the default storage engine in 2010, and prominent MySQL users had already switched to InnoDB en masse from 2005 to 2008, some even earlier. The previous storage engine (MyISAM) was garbage that wasn't even crash-safe, so at scale its deficiency was plainly obvious.
I am not posting "bullshit" or "trolling". Your statement was incorrect and this is simple date math.
