On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 02:06, Karsten Hilbert wrote: > Calle Hedberg wrote: > > The Health (Management) Information Systems Programme I'm working with now > > covers wholly or partially countries/states with around 200 mill people. We > > are moving towards DBMS independence for our solutions, but MySQL at the > > moment seems to be the logical FOSS option (many states/provinces are > > already using ORACLE, MS SQL or DB2, so it obviously makes sense for them to > > host health data in the same DBMS). > > I am completely baffled as to why this makes MySQL the logical > FOSS option ?!?
Somewhere on the MySQL web site there is a history of their product, which reveals that they originally built it purely for decision support purposes (i.e. reporting and analysis). Indeed the design and feature set of MySQL up to v3.x reflects this type of work, in which data is usually collected by other systems, and then bulk-loaded or otherwise assembled in batches into the decision support database. The emphasis is on the speed of fairly simple queries. My understanding of the Health (Management) Information Systems Programme with which Calle is involved is that it is a system which collects and aggregates summarised and unit record data collected by clinics, community health centres, hospitals and other health care facilities into a local or regional decision support database. Is that correct, Calle? If so, then MySQL is a good choice. For systems, such as GnuMed, which are designed to be primary data collections, then a database with much better and well-proven transaction processing capabilities, such as PostgreSQL, is a better choice. MySQL is adding such facilities in V4.x and v5.x, but PostgreSQL has had them for over a decade, so for now, I know which one I would prefer to use for the collection of primary, transactional data. But for "secondary" data, MySQL is fast and reliable. BTW, MySQL seems to have become popular for the first generation of Web sites because data-driven Web sites are typically very read-intensive, and MySQL reads data very quickly. The few updates required in first generation data-driven Web sites also tended to be fairly simple. But now people want to do much more complex (primary) data collection through the Web, such as building EMR/EHRs, which is why MySQL is under pressure to add transactional processing capabilities. I dare say that it's transactional capabilities will mature quite quickly, given the size of its user base. Then we'll have at least two mature transaction-capable FOSS databases. And there is also Firebird (previously Interbase) and SAPdb (or is that part of MySQL now). And last time we checked, the query speed of PostgreSQL was not far behind MySQL on typical decision support queries - the limiting factor there tends to be disc access speed, not the database, anyway. -- Tim C PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
