[BangPypers] Terrible choices: MySQL. What is the way ahead?

[Anand Chitipothu]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 1:51 AM, kracekumar ramaraju <
kracethekingmaker at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 31, 2014 1:37 AM, "Noufal Ibrahim KV" <noufal at nibrahim.net.in>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Dec 30 2014, Gora Mohanty wrote:
> >
> > > On 30 December 2014 at 19:32, Noufal Ibrahim KV <
> noufal at nibrahim.net.in>
> wrote:
> > > [...]
> > >> I can't offer anything normative but in my experience (and it's a
> little
> > >> dated since I don't use mySQL for anything these days), mySQL is a
> > >> disaster waiting to hit you.
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > Personally, I agree with this, but such arguments often degenerate
> > > into flamewars. IMHO, it comes down to a matter of knowing your tools,
> > > and what use-cases they can meet. Sometimes, mysql can be what one
> > > needs.
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > They're both RDBMs. Unless you have legacy stuff to support or are tied
> > down to mySQL for any non tech. reason, I can't really think of how it
> > would be what one needs.
>
> For example, MySQL MyISAM is fast for read replica. Again MyISAM is
> terrible choice for write.
>
> Migrating from MySQL to postgres is really technical debt. Said that
> postgres quirks very little and ahead of mysql in features. Lot of
> companies cant migrate to postgres because incoming data is large.
>
> Companies choose MySQL knowing lot of consulting companies are around like
> percona, example quora.
>

Whoever is using it probably not using it because it is a good database,
probably something else. For example, friendfeed used it as a nosql store.

I've been through horror of mysql. For example, adding a new index locks
the entire database. Not only that, since it stores entire database in a
single file, it rewrites the entire database in to a new file. If you don't
have 50% disk free, you are gone.

What to add a new column? plan for downtime again.

The big companies using mysql would have found work-arounds for these
issues. I don't think individual developers can afford that.

Internet Archive (place where I work) was down for 8 hours because we
wanted to add couple of columns and build index on them. Fortunately, we
have switched to Postgres and both these operations can now be done without
second thoughts.

Anand