Re: Oracle Innobase Purchase Impacts MySQL.

Paul wrote:
> Frank van Bortel <frank.van.bortel_at_gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Interbase/Firebird has been around for approximately as long as
> Oracle, particularly if you consider its heritage from DEC Rdb
> projects from the same original architect. However, unlike Oracle, it
> has always been designed to be self-tuning and to need very little
> DBA/user intervention.

In the O7.1 time frame, I was at a place that had a corrupted segment in their corporate hq rdb db. I offered to fly there and fix it, but intra-company politics decreed I work with the Oracle. It was messed up for a long time, don't know if they ever fixed it. But a plus for rdb anyways, it still kept going for the non-corrupt stuff. So "very little" can have a range of values...

>
>
> > OK? And please, do install all options Oracle has standard.
>
>
> Unfair! I am merely saying that Firebird consumes vastly fewer CPU
> cycles than Oracle - I made no reference to the gazillion features of
> Oracle which do not exist in FB (or many other resource hungry db
> systems).
>
> I have tried to stress before and will continue to try and emphasise
> that the two systems are different, but both are RDBMS's. Oracle is a
> kitchen-sink implementation and pays the price for that in terms of
> machine load, admin overhead and hardware requirements.

This is true. However, it happens to be the best compromise for business systems, from MVCC alone.

>
> Interbase/Firebird (and particularly Firebird, since we can actually
> see where the raw code is going - the move to C++ combined with an
> (sometimes painfully fussy - even "overdemocratic") Open Source model
> ) is a very small, neat, effective and even elegant RDMS solution for
> *_A LOT_* of people's needs.
>
> I am *_NOT_* saying that it has all of the capabilities of Oracle,
> that would be ridiculous, however I am saying that given its small
> overhead and its suitability for a (growing) number of database
> projects, I think that there is something that is to be learnt from
> the FB model. The whole install is 32 MB (with examples and samples).
> The server itself is 1.493 MB. It will run on a server with 32 MB of
> RAM.
>
>
> Personally, I find that the fact that one can do *_an awful lot_* of
> what one can do with Oracle with such a small *_elegant_* system to be
> telling somewhat of what might be seen as feature bloat with Oracle. I
> have used it to programme systems and it is perfect - no overhead, no
> DBA, no loss of necessary speed and perfect data consisitency over
> years of in production use on modest machines.

I think you are correct, Oracle doesn't scale _down_ well.

>
>
> I'm sick to the back teeth of Oracle "people" talking about other
> RDBMS's as "toy databases". That's like the users of a Ferrari or a
> Lamborghini talking about the VW Beatle (or Bug or Cocinelle or
> whatever it was called where you happen to live) as a "toy" car. It
> may not have had the speed or facile aesthetics of an F/L, but it gets
> the job done and doesn't need a specialist team of mechanics working
> on it night and day to get the damn thing to work, constantly reparing
> it, and needing to know off the top of their heads 3 million db
> parameters for it to work at all in the first place.

Get used to it. Oracle isn't a Ferrari or Lamborghini. Bugs may be useful little cars, they will run poorly forever. I wouldn't want to drive a football team to a game in one (though trying to stuff some cheerleaders in might be fun).

SQL> select count(*) from v$parameter;

  COUNT(*)

       259

And I haven't really had to know many of them off the top of my head. This might have been a legitimate complaint ten years ago, now it only applies to a few situations.

>
>
> I will finish this rant with the words of Antoine de St. Exupéry,
> "True beauty is not achieved when there is nothing more to add, but
> rather when there is nothing more to be taken away".

Yeah, like a Lotus. Guess what - people over 5'10" can't fit in most models.

jg

--
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