Re: NASA switches from Oracle to MySQL

"JoeB" <joeb_at_jagas.demon.co.uk> wrote in message news:3A54C4E8.483D2CB5_at_jagas.demon.co.uk...
> NASA switches from Oracle to MySQL.
>
> Software shift at NASA may herald similar switch by other government
> agencies.
> Are the days of number of ORACLE numbered?
> Plus, Oracle extends $1 million challenge to BEA users, but not Open
> Source Databases?
> Why?
>
> Read full story on http://www.computercontractor.net
>

MySQL is not a transactional database, so it doesn't even qualify for TCP benchmarks. A custom C to an ISAM file database is orders of magnitude faster than Oracle, and much faster than MySQL, but it still doesn't make it a good choice.

Look up the acronym ACID and you will see why MySQL is only good as a "toy" database.

Postgres is the closest thing to a real database in the Open Source community, and it is well below what would be considered acceptable for commercial use, and it would never past muster for critical data.

There are also some issues with Linux that make it a poor choice as a database platform. Linux lacks true raw I/O except through extensions such as from SGI and Red Hat (version 6EE). These kernel extensions bring Linux closer to the I/O performance of NT or Solaris, but not equal. With *identical* hardware, commercial databases actually run faster on Windows 2k than on Linux (usually by a factor of 2 or more for Oracle).

Open Source has its place. Databases is not one of those places yet. I use Linux daily as a testing and development platform. We also use it as our production web server, mail and news platforms. However, we wouldn't dream of using it for a production database. I have benchmarked Oracle on NT compared to Oracle on Linux, and my Linux box was twice the machine of the NT box. Oracle on NT was faster.

Our production database platform is Solaris, which has proven to one of the best choices as a database platform.

I am not slamming Open Source. I am only making the point that Open Source is *not* a panacea for all our computing woes.

Chris Weiss
Chief Scientist for Database Engineering PureCarbon, Inc. Received on Thu Jan 04 2001 - 22:58:49 CST