Re: Sun Talks about MySQL

[Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com>]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> Therefore the claim that the sudden addition of 100 developers who know
> about databases to the MySQL "stable" will result in sudden increases in
> innovation is nonsense.

Adding a bunch of new developers to a project involving a code base they 
are unfamiliar with will inevitably reduce short-term reliability.  But 
you can't pay attention to anything said by someone who claims any piece 
of software has zero bugs anyway; they've clearly lost all touch with 
reality and are saying nonsense.  Zack at MySQL might as well have said 
that they have magical code fairies who have fixed 5.1 and will continue 
to be on board for future releases.

I think it shows how much MySQL has been feeling the pain from the truly 
shoddy 5.0 release and its associated quality control issues that they are 
publicizing the incredible number of bug fixes they had to do, and flat 
out admitting they weren't happy with it.

An interesting data point is they advertise a 10-15% gain in DBT2 results. 
I've started thinking about a 2008 update to my "PostgreSQL vs. MySQL" 
paper that covers PG 8.3 and MySQL 5.1.  I'd love to have a similar 
comparision using that same benchmark of PG8.2->PG8.3.  I recall Heikki 
was doing lots of tests with DBT2 for EnterpriseDB comparing those two 
releases like that; anybody know of a good summary I could utilize there? 
I thought that was one of the benchmarks that got a 20-30% speedup on 
going to 8.3 because it really took advantage of HOT in particular.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD