Hacker News Reader

if it matters, must have backups! ( +replication +geographical distribution etc as needs must )

Even a perfect database, should such a thing ever exist, is not sufficient to protect us from a determined disaster

Sure, I came in after their disaster to clean up, and their issue was their backups weren't up to date and they had no replication etc (it was a small site, no sysadmin, they rebooted their server during a busy time and boom! All the other services came up ok, but not mysql). The fact that Mysql failed and ended up with corrupted dbs on a simple reboot (not power failure) doesn't fill me with confidence - that really shouldn't happen. That's just an anecdote of course, but I think I prefer working with psql anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com