Poll: What database does your company use? • Hacker News Board

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#341

Post by rcrowley » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 3:37 PM UTC

kahawe wrote: post #183

patrickaljord wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a younger/smaller companies, I wouldn't use Oracle/DB2 even if it was free. Happy mongodb user here.

As someone who has worked in young, small and medium, old and larger companies: I wouldn't use mongo/couch outside of non-critical webapps even if I was paid to do so and for my own (cynic) understanding, it is as much a "database" as a folder with clear text files is. Yes, Oracle is big, bad and "ebil" and I cannot stand their sales drones.. but if you ever had an "oh CRAP" moment, chances are very good that the db…

Mongo is by many measures worse than "a folder with clear text files."

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#342

Post by bockris » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 3:43 PM UTC

Confusion wrote: post #60

Well, we're not using it ourselves, but at one client our application connects to DB2... on an AS/400... using JRuby :).

nitpick: DB2 on the iSeries (nee AS/400) is DB2 in name only.

That being said, I do the same thing using Python.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#343

Post by rosser » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 3:45 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #332

spitfire wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second this. For the longest time mysql was the quickest way on the web to lose your data. As in corrupt databases. It also didn't support transactions where postgres did. Essentially mysql was a dumb datastore with sql interface, whereas postgres was a database. That's changed now, but postgres is still a head in reliability(shit just doesn't break) and feature-set. and I hear in speed these days. But I no long…

Except if you want to do a nice pagination interface over a set of data. select count( ) in postgresql takes forever on large tables. select count( ) over myisam is speedy. select count(*) over innodb is speedy but an estimate (I'd still prefer an fast estimate over exceedingly slow accuracy for many scenarios, such as paginated web interfaces).

That's because of PostgreSQL's MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control) architecture. And, yes, while some aggregate queries can tend to suck on very large tables (for which there are a good half-dozen workarounds; this is the FAQ-est of FAQs), the upside of MVCC is that read queries can never block write queries, and write queries can never block read queries.

The benefit that has in terms of increased concurrency is worth far, far more than having to implement a workaround for quick-and-dirty row counts for simple things like pagination, IMO.

(Aside: InnoDB is also MVCC-based, which is why its COUNT(*) is an estimate. The MySQL folks apparently decided that it was better to provide an estimate than an exact count, while the PostgreSQL folks decided the other way. There's a part of me that wants to call that symbolic of the way the two projects operate on a much broader level...)

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#344

Post by mst » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 3:51 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #235

mmphosis wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atomic transactions, perhaps at the expense of pgsql being slower. Subqueries, but we don't require this in production. Wariness of Oracle's conflict of interest.

Mysql has had subqueries since version 4.1, circa 2004!

But the optimiser is really bad at doing sensible things with them.

Worse still, subqueries in the FROM clause are (documented to be) implemented as an unindexed temp table.

Google apparently compiles subquery support out of their mysql instances so people don't mistakenly think they're usable.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#345

Post by fdr » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 4:05 PM UTC

jmulho wrote: post #241

bad_user wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as? Really, I'd like to know the reason for why a company might choose Oracle.

Oracle costs at least twice as much as any other databases. Yet companies still buy it. Why do people buy things that cost twice as much? Hint: it's better. Forget price for a moment, any feelings you might have for Larry Ellison, the good/evil nature of the company, or whatever. Consider the software itself. Many people aren't all that familiar with the basic things a database is supposed to do. The list is large. I…

> But when it comes to building spacial indexes on hierarchical dimensions, or whatever, Postgres just isn’t going to have a feature for that. I’ll have to figure that one out for myself.

In this case, yes it is, Postgres probably has the best type system and extensibility of all SQL databases. GiST and GIN are very good technologies that also exist in Informix.

If I had to choose something that is missing in Postgres and very far away for sheer want of implementation effort, it's parallel execution of queries.

Oracle RAC is also quite a crazy and neat feature, except when it has problems, in which case you get even more crazy for that crazy.

On the other hand, Oracle is also not a strict superset of the features in PostgreSQL. For example, 9.1 has the only credibly fast implementation of SERIALIZABLE level isolation that I am aware of. There are also interesting features like "index exclusion constraints" that have no equivalent in Oracle, and solve problems hard to solve otherwise (example constraint: there are no overlapping circles in this table)

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#346

Post by dgallagher » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 4:12 PM UTC

billybob wrote: post #295

dgallagher wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally picked PostgreSQL instead of MySQL since I don't trust Oracle. Why support a free database server when it competes with Oracle RDBMS? Granted Oracle RDBMS is extremely expensive, but still, something doesn't sit well with me...

I felt the same mistrust for Oracle, but at Railsconf, I had the chance to talk with the team from Percona, which is a free fork of MySQL that makes some performance improvements and sells consulting (think Red Hat). The Percona team said that Oracle has a lot of customers who are using Oracle RDBMS for big stuff and MySQL for smaller stuff, and they like being able to sell support for both, but they don't see MySQL…

Thanks for the clarification billybob. :) Part of my perception was driven by the unknown; what would happen if Oracle stopped putting money into it? It's nice to hear that Percona appears to be a potential candidate to continue its development if anything bad ever happened to it on Oracle's end.

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#347

Post by asjo » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 4:44 PM UTC

derobert wrote: post #107

asjo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a graph of this poll: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/database2011/data.png ... and one of the 2010 poll: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/database2010/data.png (Updated every ~4 hours currently; I will be fading out the update rate.)

The bars are different sizes and in different orders, this makes it much harder to compare by flipping between browser tabs.

They reflect the polls, so they also tell you that the polls didn't have the same choices.

The two sets of data ought to be shown in the same graph, really.

Edit: I have now joined the two years in one graph, and plot the percentages to make it easy to see the change: http://koldfront.dk/misc/hn/database/data.png

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#348

Post by abyssknight » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 4:45 PM UTC

j-bone wrote: post #41

If SQLServer is going to be referred to as "Microsoft" shouldn't MySQL be lumped under the "Oracle" grouping?

I have to agree, and planned to comment just to say the same. SQL Server is incredibly powerful, easy to use, and scales okay. If StackOverflow is any indication, people are seriously underestimating (and mis-representing) the Microsoft offerings.

Just to name a few:

* SQL Server

* SQL Server Express

* SQL Compact 4

* SQL Azure

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#349

Post by farktronix » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 5:01 PM UTC

thechangelog wrote: post #16

SQLite all over the place – it's great having a super portable DB format for quick little hits. There's nothing quite like sending a DB as an email attachment.

Agreed. SQLite also has a great copyright notice in its headers:

  ** The author disclaims copyright to this source code.  In place of
  ** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
  **
  **    May you do good and not evil.
  **    May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
  **    May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

(http://www.sqlite.org/src/artifact?name=a8571665d43ff18f89a4...)

Re: Poll: What database does your company use?

#350

Post by andrewgph » Thu, Jun 23, 2011, 5:19 PM UTC

bmunro wrote: post #323

zwischenzug wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Informix too! Well, our customers do. Thought we were a dying breed. Surprised to see it mentioned here twice. We use Postgres and MySQL too.

We/Our customers also use informix. We also use postgres a little bit too. The company was a startup about 15 years ago. Actually, looking at your past comments, looks like we may work at the same company.

ditto ...