Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

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> MySQL is unfairly treated because of Oracle acquisition

That, and the history of doing things “wrong” for the sake of performance, and the community banging on about how those of us caring about the data were just being picky¹²³, from long before Oracle came along. myISAM was the default for far too long.

> MySQL 8 with MyRocks engine

For those concerned about Oracle, there is of course MariaDB which also supports MyRocks.

I'm not sure what the current state of play is, but for a while at least MySQL was slower moving than MariaDB, getting CTE support (in production ready releases) a couple of years later for example.

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[1] just implement FKs in your own code!

[2] why is 2005-02-31 being sent to the database anyway, why should it check for valid dates?!

[3] … you postgres/sql-server/other people are just expecting things the application should deal with, look how fast this is at bulk inserts compared to your “properly”!

http://sqlanywhere.blogspot.com/2008/03/unpublished-mysql-fa...

for those of us who are old enough to remember actual internet flame culture, this is an amazing late example.

Admittedly, those items could be dealt with at the application later, and for that price you got something very fast.

And fast back then meant cheap. Hardware was more expensive than people. It’s reversed now, of course, and we want extra layers and thing to make developers more productive. But back in the MySQL heyday, that was not the case, and I for one am glad something like it was around.

> those items could be dealt with at the application later

That was always one of the arguements, but beyond toy projects or at least beyond a single simple app accessing the DB the application layer is not the best place for that to be implemented.

Maybe I'm anal, but there is a point where giving up correctness for performance feels far too icky to me.

Also those professing mysql to be the solution back then did so with an almost religious furvour that is always troubling, and if something else threatened their messiah such as sqlite beating it in some benchmark by their own terms, ooh there were hissy-fits and claims of witchcraft!

It was the difference between website up or website down.

So, yeah, lots of emotion in that. I only made ad money when site was up, and thus could eat. Such a direct correlation can make you (well, me in this case) a weirdo.

I never talking anything else down so much as give praise to that which saved my bacon.

Cloudflare was another one of those things when DDOSes hit.

To be fair, MyISAM hasn't been the default since MySQL 5.5... which was released over 10 years ago. I stopped using MySQL in favor of Postgres quite some time ago, so not sure about the current data validation / integrity story, however.

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