Well, in the hopes that *some* good comes out of all this.... 1) for most production environments that are already on Oracle, switching to MySQL can range from straightforward (e.g. you are just using Hibernate) to impossible (if you're using a specific feature like DICOM which is not present in MySQL)
2) shared-nothing architectures scale well but I believe they continue to be on the margins. Fooler conveniently points out that a lot of large enterprises use shared-nothing: but all of these enterprises have something in common, lots of money and lots of in-house expertise. My original contention stands: shared-nothing is not as straightforward although it scales higher. 3) RAC scales well while the number of nodes is small (e.g. < 10). Generalizing that "RAC scales negatively" is inaccurate and a dis-service to all the people using RAC to run their business. 4) MySQL Cluster seems to have matured quite a bit in the last couple years and Sun is really pushing it in the telecoms space. Although to be honest I have never gone up against MySQL in a telecom account, more common is Solid and Altibase. I would not push Oracle solutions where they are not appropriate; in fact if I was setting up my own startup or something I would certainly use MySQL (clustered or non-clustered) to keep my burn rate down while I was ramping up. All technologies have their drawbacks, but you have to balance budget versus development time versus market acceptability. I think it is safe to say that outside Web 2.0 applications MySQL hasn't gotten that much traction. As an aside, Fooler loves to point out that I'm biased and an Oracle shill. But that's OK, everybody here knows where I come from and I make no effort to conceal my affiliations. I do wonder why he seems overly bitter about his Oracle and RAC experience (please see his original posts) and interestingly enough all these years on PLUG I don't know Fooler's real name. So he can call out people and brand them as "useless" with impunity. _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
