Why I don't like MySQL
======================

Saturday 4 April 2009 12:28

In university I learned about databases using
Microsoft Access. Which means the theory of the
course was about databases in general but we got to
play around with the stuff using Access. Later also
went to some related course about optimizing tape
robot movements, but the point is that in the early
nineties there was no MySQL.

About ten years later I encounter MySQL in the web
development world. Brushing up on my SQL skills I
try the first example from my ten year old course
material, and it fails. It turns out at that point
MySQL didn't support subqueries, something
Microsoft Access supported about ten years earlier!
The current version of MySQL seems to support
subqueries, but I still have the feeling MySQL is
seriously lagging behind. A large part of the MySQL
user base have never seen another database, or
learned about database theory so they are not able
to see what could be wrong with MySQL. All they
seem to care about is how fast MySQL is doing
selects, implying their community status is based
on how many selects they need. With a user base
like that you don't need to move forward, and most
likely the number of newbies picking up MySQL is
larger than the number of mature developers moving
away from it, so with a growing user base what can
be wrong with it?

And anyone preferring MySQL seems like a newbie
because they can't admit they liked the previous
version of MySQL because that was lacking some
serious features, like subqueries, stored
procedures, triggers, unicode, etc. and in any
discussion about the features of MySQL they are
like, yeah, I know databases so the previous
versions of MySQL that lacked what the latest
version now really has all sucked, but that latest
version says it supports everything I need, I don't
know how to use it yet because I'm stuck with
something set up in MySQL 3 and I don't see the
point of moving all queries to stored procedures,
but MySQL is good enough for me and my big database
with thousands of rows. And that has been going on
since MySQL 3...

How about, just move on to the world's most
advanced open source database?

by Roland van Ipenburg
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ipenburg/blog/posts/work/2009/04/04/why-i-dont-like-mysql/