MYSQL and RDBMS

Question

I'm having difficulties to answer this question. Can someone help me?

Discuss the benefits of MYSQL and explain why it is gaining acceptance as the RDBMS of choice for many organizations worldwide.

Answer 1

Here are benefits of using MySQL (link)

Also, a more throughout lecture (link)

And wiki (link)

Answer 2

MySQL is fast, free and open-source. It is easy to get up and running, has a good API in many languages and several inbuilt scaling options (replication and recently partioning).

In addition, it has very good marketing :)

Answer 3

Try asking Sun Microsystems for their opinion on MySQL.

Answer 4

MYSQL is not always free. If you intend to use it for commercial purposes, a license should be bought (link1 link2). You may want to double check.

You are not forced to buy a license but it is recommended. Open source software development does not always come free of cost.

Answer 5

MySQL is light, easy to use and has an excellent worldwide community that is very active. An active, vibrant community indicates a certain acceptance by your peers and I think is a very good indication of a product's position in the market. I, personally have had almost immediate answers to any queries posted on the MySQL forum.

Post, the acquisition of MySQl by Sun, it has gained even more traction and recognition in the industry. Depending on the type of support you want, you can opt for commercial versions of MySQL.

These are my personal views. I'm pretty sure you can get a lot of links on the web detailing MySQL's myriad features.

Answer 6

Thanks so much, for all that replied to this post. It helped me a lot to better understand MYSQL.

Answer 7

I think it depends on the size of the organization as well. I would not say that MySQL is gaining worldwide acceptance. Most large corporations (Fortune 500) are still gun-shy about open source software and would prefer to pay for support.

The new service model that's being employed by open source companies, like Spring Source, JBoss and Red Hat, and MySQL from Sun, helps a great deal.

But it hasn't opened any flood gates. Most IT managers know that they won't lose their jobs buying from IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. They'll complain about the license fees, but they're still worried about open source.

There's a two-tiered adoption model: large and small. The large companies feel comfortable with IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle and mainstream languages like C# and Java. The small companies can take a shot with open source and Python, Ruby, etc.

Answer 8

Because it's free (or historically has been free) and gained critical mass on the on the open source platform stack earlier than its competitors (e.g., postgresql).

Due to classic network effects in software, and rdbms is valuable not just in itself but also its userbase, especially so for OSS where users can contribute back. This is why critical mass is so important.

Network effects in any product are classically observed to cause a "snowball effect" or self-fulfilling prophecy where popularity fuels further popularity. This can ensure the dominance of an early successful product despite any technical flaws it may or may not have. Additionally, rdbms customers are highly conservative (DBAs are loathe to putting anything in production that hasn't been out for very long) and switch costs between rdbms' are significant for any development team, due to innumerable subtleties of their use and operation.

Answer 9

While the network effect is why MySQL remains popular, I think it gained its popularity for two simple reasons: it is free which makes it ideal for cheap webhosts to provide to their cheap web admins; and it is good enough for most tasks one would use a cheap webhost for.

MySQL didn't climb into prominence in the IT back office. Webhost providers for the toy website users needed a database offering. Before there was myspace and facebook and livejournal would be web site makers would roll their own using the cheapest website provider available.

The synergy with PHP's own rise to popularity is probably not insignificant either. But that's an unnecessary digression I suspect.