Is mysql a RDBMS ?

I have only read Elmasri/Navathe and I find it nearly impossible to implement any non-trivial Enhanced Entity relationship diagram in MySQL,
according to the mailing list, important foreign key constraints are not supported,

===
"Morten Gulbrandsen" <mgu_at_owi-aachen.de> wrote:
>

[skip]

> ALTER TABLE EMPLOYEE # here is the buggy code
> ADD FOREIGN KEY (DNO) REFERENCES DEPARTMENT(DNUMBER)
> ON DELETE SET DEFAULT
> ON UPDATE CASCADE;
>
> ALTER TABLE DEPARTMENT
> ADD FOREIGN KEY (MGRSSN) REFERENCES EMPLOYEE(SSN)
> ON DELETE SET DEFAULT
> ON UPDATE CASCADE ;
>
>
> Please tell me what could be wrong,

ON DELETE SET DEFAULT is not supported. That is why you can't create foreign key constraints. ===

What I have seen from other MySQL projects is that a combination of MySQL and PHP or Perl is necessary to create a workaround beyond MySQLs limitations.

Also Elmasri / Navathe discusses many RDBMS including

INGRES
Oracle of Oracle, Inc.
Sybase of Sybase, Inc.
INFORMIX of Informix, Inc.
PARADOX,
DBase IV,
WATCOM SQL,
SQL Server (of Sybase,Inc.),
SQL Server (of Microsoft),
MS Access

Postgres is mentioned but no discussion of MySQL,

Why ?

It is the most popular SQL server,
so I can start to believe that alone MySQL is no RDBMS, unless it is combined with another programming language,

Is this true ?

From Elmasri:

To qualify as a genuine relational DBMS, a system must have at least the following properties:

1.) It must store data as relations such that each column is independently identified by its column name and the ordering of rows is immaterial.

2.) The operations available to the user, as well as those used internally by the system, should be true relational operations; that is, they should be able to generate new relations from old relations.

3.) The system must support at least one variant of the JOIN operation.

Which open source products can offer this and hence qualify for being an RDBMS or even ANSI SQL compatibility ?

Yours Sincerely

Morten Gulbrandsen Received on Thu Aug 21 2003 - 10:16:04 CEST