August 9, 2005
Open source DBMS — easier to install?
Lewis Cunningham compared the installation ease of Oracle, PostGRES and MySQL. Despite expecting Oracle to win (uh, why?), he wound up ranking PostGRES first, with Oracle and MySQL tied — and that’s after marking MySQL down (indirectly albeit not directly) for lacking documentation in a beta release.
This just goes to show: The inherent complexity of the high-end products can outweigh users’ greater familiarity with them.
Besides, ever more people — especially cheap recent grads — are familiar with MySQL.
EDIT: Cunningham has a little more to say here.
Technorati Tags: Database, DBMS, DBMS2, MySQL, Oracle, PostGRES
Comments
One Response to “Open source DBMS — easier to install?”
I’m just curious… why did Lewis go to Google and Amazon to find documentation on MySQL 5.0, rather than looking in the docs subdirectory of his MySQL installation, or browse to the MySQL website where the online reference manual is? (dev.mysql.com/doc/)
All the information he was looking for in fact existed. Sometimes, Google is not the best place to find information, but of course it entirely depends on the keywords you use. Let’s test… a search for MySQL stored procedures:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mysql+stored+procedures
The first hit is a useful article, the second is the chapter head from the online manual. That manual chapter was also already there when Lewis did his article. I know that, because I wrote the first instance of it way back earlier in 2004.
Perhaps Lewis will re-run the test when MySQL 5.0 GA comes out, soon.