Quoting Frank Wiles [email protected]:
On Tue, 8 Mar 2005 09:44:43 -0600 Dave Hull [email protected] wrote:
MySQL is much easier to manage than Oracle, IMHO. But if you're dealing with money, it's probably a safer bet to stick with Oracle, though I'm not sure that's going to be true for much longer.
If you're dealing with money... now that is a silly reason. Oracle is no more safe than PostgreSQL, it's called making a good backup.
I use PostgreSQL every day for money related transactions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I intentionally left PostgreSQL out of my comments because I have almost zero experience with it. From what I've read, it's as capable as Oracle. Something MySQL had not been until recently since they lacked support for referential integrity, atomic transactions and stored procedures.
The version of MySQL we're now using has enforced referential integrity and full transaction support. The performance is amazingly good and the care and feeding required are minimal. We've been using it for almost a year and I believe it just came out of beta... shh, don't tell my superiors I had deployed a beta product in a production environment handling hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I wish I could say the same about the care and feeding of our Oracle deployments. I dread patching our Oracle RDBMSes (yes Oracle does a lot more than just DB, but this thread started out about the DB specifically). Some of the Oracle patches go smoothly, some of them make me feel like I'm caught in a Rube Goldberg machine.
I'm not a decision maker (well, not for RDBMS decisions anyway) where I work, so I didn't decide to go with Oracle and for our purposes, I'm not sure why we're using it. I think it had something to do with the fact that we could get support for both the OS (RHELAS) and the DB from one vendor.
I have been working with Oracle as a DBA and programmer for four years now and in that time it has been very reliable, but management is not painless. I've been working on a product that I hope to take to the market one day and it runs entirely on MySQL. I think it's ready for the enterprise, but that's only because I've seen it working flawlessly for us in a high volume 24/7 environment.
One day I hope to get my hands dirty with PostgreSQL, but there's so little time.
Oracle is really only necessary if you need to run a HUGE database across multiple servers. Otherwise, it's just a waste of money.
Ahh RAC, er Grid, er something... How does PostgreSQL cluster? Supposedly MySQL has clustering support, but I don't know anyone that's tried it yet. I like the idea of clustering Oracle DBs and repurposing different servers at different times depending on current needs, but thus far we haven't needed it yet.
-- Dave Hull http://insipid.com