Oracle FAQ Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid
HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US
 

Home -> Community -> Usenet -> c.d.o.server -> Re: Oracle Innobase Purchase Impacts MySQL.

Re: Oracle Innobase Purchase Impacts MySQL.

From: Paul <paul_at_see.my.sig.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2005 21:01:03 +0100
Message-ID: <t0kal1plio4grdgd9070gssc0cm8rvsibv@4ax.com>

"Joel Garry" <joel-garry_at_home.com> wrote:

> > 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.

Surely this depends on the business you're in? If you want/need all of Oracle's features, then sure, fire ahead and put your money on the wood, but if you want a very good db implementation and don't want to (or probably more importantly can't afford to) fork out lots of money, then Firebird is an excellent choice for a sizeable chunk of the applications that I have ever worked on or seen working (naturally, your default implementations tend to favour MS SQL Server or Oracle), but I maintain firmly that Firebird could handle a good chunk of the market, without being as resource hungry as Oracle (or SQL Server for that matter).

Your average business has no need of a db that can cope with TB of data - note the use of the word *_average_*. FB can handle several 10's and 100's of MB of data well - as far as I know, there aren't that many > 1TB implementations in the wild.  

> > 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 am also arguing that it is overkill for many of the everyday apps for which it is used.  

> > 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.

They'll do 120 (that's KM) on the motorway just fine - sure you won't be able to drive them around Monaco at 250, but how many people get to do that? They fulfilled a requirement for *_far_* more people than much more powerful (and hence much more expensive) models ever have done or will (in market share terms).

Being unable to do 250 doesn't mean that the car is running poorly.

> I wouldn't want to
> drive a football team to a game in one

So, it's a Ferrari truck then?

> (though trying to stuff some cheerleaders in might be fun).

8-)  

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

> COUNT(*)
> ----------
> 259

How does one select the count of the undocumented ones?  

> 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.

Fair enough, but it does apply. I'm not directly comparing the two, just saying that FB is a stronger candidate db for many apps than your average "snobbish" Oracle user seems to be willing to accept - hence my remarks about "toy databases", which I've heard verbatim as well as read here. It is not a toy, albeit not up to Oracle's capabilities, but one pays a (I would suggest heavy enough) price for those.

Of course, all this is coming from somebody who's looking to more over to being an Oracle DBA/Programmer from being an application programmer - ever search the job boards for "Firebird" - if you get one response, you'd be lucky - I don't think I've ever seen a requirement for an Interbase/Firebird dba/programmer (a couple for PostgreSQL - although that was on their own groups).

> > 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.
 

Take away their ankles!

Paul...

> jg

-- 

plinehan __at__ yahoo __dot__ __com__

XP Pro, SP 2, 

Oracle, 9.2.0.1.0 (Enterprise Ed.)
Interbase 6.0.1.0;

When asking database related questions, please give other posters 
some clues, like operating system, version of db being used and DDL.
The exact text and/or number of error messages is useful (!= "it didn't work!").
Thanks.
 
Furthermore, as a courtesy to those who spend 
time analysing and attempting to help, please 
do not top post.
Received on Tue Oct 18 2005 - 15:01:03 CDT

Original text of this message

HOME | ASK QUESTION | ADD INFO | SEARCH | E-MAIL US