Hi Elizabeth, The first question I would ask why don't you want Oracle? If you can't come up with a good business reason why your company shouldn't go with Oracle I would say you have already lost the battle. The second question is who is making the purchasing decision? If it's middle management or the bean counters then you have pretty well lost again because nobody ever lost their job for buying Oracle.
Oracle has a number of advantages that make it a very safe purchasing decision; it's a market leader, it's widely supported, it's robust, it scales well, and it comes with a full suite of development and deployment tools. The only weakness Oracle has is its price tag. And the price goes beyond the cost of the database. Oracle's development tools are pricey, a large hardware platform is needed to support not only the production box but also developers workstations and, if you are doing a client/server deployment, the end users machines. Also the price of a good Oracle DBA and development team is fairly steep. MySQL on the other hand is fairly inexpensive over all. There is no special training required in order to set up an instance and start playing. It can be easily integrated with a number of scripting languages giving your development team a boost in performance. It also has a very small footprint. Our production box is a PIII 800 with 256MB of RAM running Linux as the OS. We have over 100 users and over 100 tables and we have not yet had any performance issues. MySQL also has a very responsive support staff and a mailing list chock full of talented people who like answering questions ;) MySQL also has what some people consider fairly serious drawbacks. MySQL does not support triggers or foreign key constraints (yet) so data integrity is always at risk. There is no equivalent of PL/SQL in MySQL, all database procedures etc. must be written in a 3GL, such as C, and then linked in. If you feel your shop should become a MySQL shop I suggest you look at the business reasons why and use those reasons to argue your case for you. Technical coolness or altruistic support of the open source movement doesn't cut it with most managers. Productivity, cost, and support usually does. John Griffin -----Original Message----- From: Elizabeth Bogner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 10:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: MySQL vs. Oracle (not speed) A company I work with is in the process of upgrading its databases from some motheaten system to something current. My impression is that they want to go with Oracle, and I'm not sure if this is based on anything other than being impressed with the size and presumed quality support of Oracle. I'd like to encourage them to at least seriously consider using MySQL instead. I don't think that speed is a huge factor here; we do a lot of XML publishing and content management, but at most we'd have several gigabytes of data and several dozen simultaneous users, so well within the capabilities of MySQL. I've looked at various things I could find, like the benchmarks pages (probably not relevant) and the MySQL myths page, which was somewhat helpful, but I couldn't find anything more along the lines of "How to Convince my Management to go with MySQL." I don't even know what to expect from them, but I'm imagining they'll say, "But MySQL doesn't support sub-selects," to which I can reply, "But you can write most of those as joins anyway, so it won't matter because the software will all be written from scratch." Etc. Are there pointers anyone can give me? E. Bognewitz --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
