> In short, MySQL offered the appearance of ease of use, which meant you
> didn't need a DBA or even, really, to read the manual. For most
> people it was good enough. It turned out that once you started trying
> to scale it, you really did need all those features that the MySQL
> 3.2.3 and earlier manuals said nobody would ever actually need; but by
> the time you found that out, you already had a sunk cost in your
> development so far, and MySQL's dialect of SQL was even stranger than
> Oracle's so it was hard to move away from MySQL.
I think that's a lot of it. A majority of my experience with it is
from the Internet "boom" of the late 90's - we used it because it was
sloppy. Because it was sloppy, it was easy - it let you concentrate
a lot more on the *quantity* of the code, rather than the *quality*.
I don't know if it's still as sloppy (forgiving or loose), but I do
know that data integrity had/has taken a back seat to speed and ease of
use for a long time. Or at least it had when I was using a lot
more of it (really? i can do an INSERT statement, and because the
type is wrong it'll just say it was successful but silently fail?
really?).
Now, I'll usually replace a piece of application software that
requires MySQL, rather than use MySQL over PostgreSQL. Shame on
open-source app developers that write only for MySQL.
Benny
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