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?