Why (do I) hate MySQL?
----------------------

(This was written by Don Baccus in a thread about the Gread Bridge, LLC
benchmarks of PostgreSQL, MySQL and others...)

  It's no secret that MySQL falls apart under load when there are inserts
  and updates in the mix.  They do table-level locking.  If you read 
  various threads about "hints and tricks" in MySQL-land concerning 
  performance in high-concurrency (i.e. web site) situations, there are
  all sorts of suggestions about periodically caching copies of tables for
  reading so readers don't get blocked, etc.

  The sickness lies in the fact that the folks writing these complex
  workarounds are still convinced that MySQL is the fastest, most
  efficient DB tool available, that the lack of transactions is making
  their system faster, and that the concurrency problems they see are no
  worse than are seen with "real" a RDBMS like Oracle or Postgres.  

  The level of ignorance in the MySQL world is just stunning at times,
  mostly due to a lot of openly dishonest (IMO) claims and advocacy by the
  authors of MySQL, in their documentation, for instance.  A significant
  percentage of MySQL users seem to take these statements as gospel and
  are offended when you suggest, for instance, that table-level locking
  isn't such a hot idea for a DB used to drive a popular website.

  At least now when they all shout "Slashdot's popular, and they use
  MySQL" we can answer, "yeah, but the Slashdot folks are the ones who
  paid for the integration of MySQL with the SleepyCat backend, and guess
  why?" And the Slashdot folks have been openly talking about rewriting
  their code to be more DB agnostic (I refuse to call MySQL an RDBMS) and
  about perhaps switching to Oracle in the future.  Maybe tests like this
  and more user advocacy will convince them to consider Postgres!


Also, see my comments to Monty's post to devshed.com, found at:
http://www.the-infinite.org/archive/docs/mysql/Monty-Rebuttal.txt