Friday, November 13, 2015

The annoyance of the day, brought to you live from the MySQL Ecosystem

And by MySQL Ecosystem here, I do not only include Oracle but also MariaDB.

So I am annoyed, not overly annoyed (probably also a little disappointed), but enough to do something about it (write this post).  In the last days, two blog posts - relayed in social medias - were published by MySQL vendors (I am not linking to the posts, it is a waste of time for the reader - see below - and they can be found with Google):
  • From MariaDB: MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware
  • From Oracle: MySQL Performance: What is odd with 1M QPS claimed by MariaDB 10.1 ?
I did not read in details neither of them because their topic is not interesting: comparing the performance of your favorite database against its competitor can only lead to biased results.  The goal of both of those posts looked to me like:
  • I can pee further than you,
  • My father (or database) is stronger than yours,
  • I can eat more hot dogs (or transactions) than you.
Vendors: PLEASE STOP WRITING this type of post, it is not good for anybody:
  • The reader is smart enough to not trust this type of comparison,
  • So it is a waste of time for the reader to read those posts,
  • And it is a waste of time for you to write those posts.
I am totally happy reading how a new version of a product is better than the previous one, especially if all the details are included to understand why it is better.  Also, I am delighted to read, in the same post, what are the compromises that were done to get those better results (let's not lie to each-others, everybody knows that when something gets better, something else gets worse, and transparency is the key to trust when reporting results).

Let users do the competing product comparison.  Some well written posts are out there (many thanks for their author), more will be coming (thanks in advance for their author),

The time saved can be spent improving the database.  Both MySQL 5.7 and MariaDB 10.1 have great innovations, I want to see more of them, and improvements of the current features, in MariaDB 10.2 and MySQL 5.8.

On that, let's all go back to work.

P.S.: the opinion expressed in this post are mine alone, not the one of the company allowing me to pay my bills, nor the one of people I am drinking beers with.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for very insightful blog that strikes punch directly where it should. It is shame that we at least yet have a opportunity to work together or in co-operation and create next generation of MySQL (or whatever the name would be). I have made myself the error on trying compare these product when I should have compared the feature.

    P.S: the opinion expressed in this comment are mine alone, not the one of the company allowing me to pay my bills, nor the one of people I am drinking beers with.

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