[ale] MySQL training?

George Carless kafka at antichri.st
Tue Jun 15 14:22:42 EDT 2004


> On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 05:03:02PM +0100, George Carless wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > My boss has asked me to look into local options for MySQL training in 
> > Atlanta.  I'm looking for fairly in-depth training; I don't need to be 
> > told how to perform simple joins or whatnot, but I do need to know more 
> > about performance tuning, query analysis, etc.  Does anyone have any 
> > suggestions?
> 
> While I'm pretty sure the choice ship has sailed have you considered
> PostGreSQL? Many in the Open Source Database community consider MySQL to
> be a toy database because it lacks features that commercial databases such
> as Oracle, MSSQL, DB2, and the like carry. Also being BSD licensed it has
> much less encumbrance than MySQL.

I have considered it, but we already have quite a bit in place that's 
mysql-based.  And, to be honest, most of the stuff we need doesn't 
especially need the likes of triggers, views, etc... and besides, I'm not 
too much of a fan of such things since my impression has been that the 
performance gains that they bring often come at the expensive of 
transparency and ease of deployment/porting/etc.  It may be ignorance on 
my part but I have a feeling that a lot of the pro-postgres/anti-mysql 
sentiment stems from a lack of understanding of mysql's new features 
(particularly in non-myisam databases) and from a general snobbishness 
about these things (which is the same snobbishness as tends to scorn PHP, 
etc.) .. :)

At any rate, in my environment I would say that MySQL was a pretty decent 
fit: there're more people here who understand it, and there's a greater 
potential base of people to come and hack away on it.

I'm not in any way trying to incite any argument here; just noting that 
mysql is generally fine for the tasks I'm working on.. and I think it's 
generally better from a development standpoint to work with something you 
broadly understand rather than learning something else because it's 
"better".

Cheers,
--George



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