From: Ann Barcomb Date: 14:52 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: MySQL In another mailing list, there is a bit of a flamewar going on concerning FreeBSD vs. Linux and PostgreSQL vs. MySQL. This has reminded me of my dislike of MySQL. My single biggest complaint about MySQL is that historically it hasn't promoted itself as the right tool for some jobs, but as the right tool for every job. This may have changed--I haven't checked out the marketing in recent years--but my initial impression was that MySQL was misleading people. Remember when they used to say that nobody needed transactions (it's true that not everyone does...but to say that nobody does is quite misleading)? Therefore I dislike MySQL not because of the quality of the product (which is certainly acceptable for a good number of uses), but because they have marketed themselves unscrupulously. When a software makes misleading claims and spreads ignorance simply to get a larger market share[1], I wonder what their ideals are. I also don't like it when commercial software does this, but most (not all) people have a great deal of skepticism for products that will cost them than free software. I don't like it when products promote ignorance--when the product is open source, I expect more of it. I'm disappointed in it. The ignorance it offers also lead directly to problems for me. People parrot that transactions just slow things down, without even knowing what a transaction is. And when non-standards are pushed as standards (although pretty much every dbm is guilty of adding non-standards), it leads to situations like the Explorer and Netscape HTML-tags, where you have to do at least double the work to keep everyone happy, or people don't understand why you won't do X--it must be a standard, because everyone else does it (never mind if is incompatible with the standard, and seems to show not even the slightest understanding of the intent of the standard). MySQL may have given up its previous stance, but to me it doesn't matter, because the damage is already done. --- [1] Although given what they said about transactions, perhaps they really believed it...but in that case, they should not have been writing the software. Discounting decades of research on the subject is at best reinventing the wheel.
From: Chris Nandor Date: 14:59 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: MySQL At 06:52 -0700 2003.08.27, Ann Barcomb wrote: >My single biggest complaint about MySQL is that historically it hasn't >promoted itself as the right tool for some jobs, but as the right >tool for every job. This may have changed--I haven't checked out >the marketing in recent years--but my initial impression was that >MySQL was misleading people. Remember when they used to say that >nobody needed transactions (it's true that not everyone does...but >to say that nobody does is quite misleading)? Technically, no one DOES need transactions. Everything you do with transactions CAN be done in a different way (usually much more painful, of course). So I don't think it is as misleading as the PostgreSQL fans like to say it is, though it certainly isn't the most honest thing to say, either. :-)
From: David Cantrell Date: 15:25 on 27 Aug 2003 Subject: Re: MySQL On Wed, Aug 27, 2003 at 06:59:36AM -0700, Chris Nandor wrote: > Technically, no one DOES need transactions. Everything you do with > transactions CAN be done in a different way (usually much more painful, of > course). So I don't think it is as misleading as the PostgreSQL fans like > to say it is, though it certainly isn't the most honest thing to say, > either. :-) That's only true if you have full support for SQL92 or later isn't it? Which MySQL most certainly doesn't.
From: John Handelaar
Date: 18:47 on 27 Feb 2006
Subject: MySQL
1. Default character set is Latin1
2. Default sorting is SWEDISH.
3. Converting a column or table to UTF8 encoding has no
effect on the actual content of said column or table,
instead replacing non-ASCII characters with random
garbage at will.
Still, I can use an inbuilt function to translate material
between character sets, right?
Oh, wait.
4. MySQL contains no tools to convert the contents of a
table between charsets.
Wankers.
jh
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