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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> MySQL is a competitor to their flagship Oracle DB

Does it really? I mean, sure, they are both RDBMS's, but that's a pretty broad market. Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

I can see an argument that MySQL competes with some of the same products that Oracle DB competes with (but in different market segments than where Oracle DB does), but I don't see them as directly competitive in any significant sense.

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To me, that's kind-of like saying the MacBook Air is a competitor to Apple's flagship MacBook Pro. They're two different products, made by the same company, doing pretty much the same thing but designed for different use cases. It's the way I always felt about Oracle vs. MySQL, even back before Oracle owned MySQL, that they are two different RDBMS platforms designed for two different use cases.

These days, that line may be blurred a little bit, and you can see how both paradigms (and more!) can be combined into a single product with PostgreSQL, but I feel like the MacBook analogy really sums up the way I feel about these two systems.

My project is in that position. We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

I'm not a certified DBA so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems that any non-trivial use of Oracle systems ramp up in cost very quickly. Both in terms of hard cash and time in education/training.

> We have access to an Oracle site license so we use it. However, we're considering move to a "competing" db, probably postgresql or mysql.

Good point; I was considering mostly the situation where there isn't something already on hand, but it makes sense that there would be quite a lot of times where MySQL and Oracle DB are considered alternatives for a new project/application by shops who already have an existing installation of one or the other.

Given there are more engineers working on MySQL now than any time in its history, I think Oracle is pretty committed to it. MySQL is about fast, OracleDB is about enterprise. A great many companies will run MySQL for things like web applications (especially those that need scale) while running the critical internal systems on OracleDB.

I don't think the MBPro/MBAir comparison is quite right. I think it's more like MBAir versus Mac Pro: it is very easy to see a single person having both of them and utilizing both of them extensively.

> Are there really that many use cases where, with the current market, people who are using MySQL would have Oracle as their next choice or vice versa?

RDS users?

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