On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:04:22 -0600, Mark W. Breneman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > We are in the early stages of *thinking* about moving away from MS SQL > server and moving to MySQL. Can anyone give me a quick pro / con points for > doing this or not doing this?
I'm a big MySQL fan, and a long-time MS-SQL developer/admin so I've done a lot of work stradling both camps. I'd give you one fundamental piece of advice: Don't do it just because MySQL is "free" (as in beer) Yeah, there's an order of magnitude difference in cost (MS-SQL unlimited is 5k/proc; MySQL is 500/server if you license it, which is optional for most folks). But unless you're running *lots* of processors, the savings are minimal. Pros/cons are a little hard to do unless without reference to specific needs, but based on the scenario you have below (lots of read, little write) MyISAM tables are probably faster than MS-SQL, and you can run the app on more operating systems. And it's cheaper on the backup and staging side since you don't have to pay MS rates for those licenses. > We have about 60 Databases set up on on a server that gets low traffic. Few > thousand users per day. Mostly we use the database as a data storage. We > have only a few stored procedures that probably really don't need to be > Stored Procedures. The heaviest load we ever put on the SQL server is a few > report admin pages where we use SQL to sum and count various stats about the > users answers. MySQL is plenty powerful enough, though it benefits a lot more from tuning than MS-SQL does in my experience -- both of those tools provide similar *query* tuning options, but MySQL has hundreds of options that can be tweaked to provider fine-grained control on tuning the server while MS-SQL basically does a lot of self-tuning. > I know that we will have to rewrite anything that we have used MSSQL > functions and MSSQL SQL commands. Less than you think needs rewritten -- MySQL has lots of common MS-SQL (and Oracle, etc) commands built-in or aliased to the native MySQL functions. The only difference in very common SQL off the top of my head is the non-standard way Microsoft does queries with a rowlimit -- MySQL uses SELECT xxxxxx LIMIT N etc instead of SELECT TOP N xxxxxx like MS-SQL. -- John Paul Ashenfelter CTO/Transitionpoint (blog) http://www.ashenfelter.com (email) [EMAIL PROTECTED] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Discover CFTicket - The leading ColdFusion Help Desk and Trouble Ticket application http://www.houseoffusion.com/banners/view.cfm?bannerid=48 Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:4:196310 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
