A former Oracle engineer issued a post to "defame" MySQL: "It's terrible! Postgres is highly recommended"? The truth is surprising

Recently, an Oracle engineer who is about to leave and switch to Google posted an article on his blog to "bash" MySQL.

He claimed that PostgreSQL is a better choice for open source RDBMS, "MySQL is a'quite bad' database, and you should strongly consider using Postgres."

It is reported that the engineer's name is Steinar Gunderson, who has previously served as Oracle's chief software engineer and a member of the MySQL Optimizer team. Currently, the engineer has served in the Google Chrome team.

Once this blog post was published, it caused heated discussion.

Some media commented that for the upcoming developer, this blog post can be described as a kind of "defamation" on the technology he has been studying for five years. But what is surprising is that many people in the industry approve of this engineer's point of view.

Gunderson said, "Coming to MySQL is like walking into a parallel world, where many people really believe that MySQL is the most advanced product." However, the state of the code means "enough room for improvement" and "management". The layer strongly supports large-scale refactoring."

Although Gunderson is proud of the work of MySQL, "this helps make MySQL version 8.0 a better product than version 5.7", but he also said "there is only so much you can do."

"The changes made by my colleagues and I made the MySQL optimizer move towards a fairly standard early 21st century design and made some good adjustments, but this is where it ends. Regardless of the company's internal communications department How to prove that Oracle is full of genius and is winning in cloud computing, but in the end, I still can't see enough resources to make it a competitive product."

Regarding this remark, some media commented that this is not the case, and Oracle has not stagnated on MySQL.

It turned out that as early as December last year, Oracle upgraded the online analysis and processing functions of its Oracle Cloud to ensure balanced development; in addition, the in-memory analysis engine developed by the same team that handles the Oracle database of the same name is also committed to improving the performance of open source databases. performance.

"Slander" or the truth? Is MySQL a "bad" database

Regarding the point of view pointed out by this Gunderson blog post, is this a kind of "defamation"? In addition to media comments, we still have to look at the views of more industry insiders.

It is understood that MySQL was originally developed by David Axmark and Michael Widenius, and the first version dates back to 1995. The founding Swedish company MySQL AB was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, and Sun was acquired by Oracle in 2009.

After the acquisition, Michael - or "Monty" - Widenius immediately handed over MySQL to MariaDB and hired a group of MySQL development teams. Since then, MariaDB has been releasing its MySQL iteration (especially DBaaS as a managed service).

Below the introduction of the business acquired by the above companies, Gunderson also strongly refuted in his blog post, “Don’t believe that MariaDB (better than MySQL) is better. The reason why Monty and his team left was not because they realized they had made too much in the code. Serious chaos, but because they are dissatisfied with the new way of governance."

Gunderson did not elaborate on why PostgreSQL as an open source relational database is much better than MySQL, but he is not the only one who has this view.

According to The Register, on Postgres Sudio 2021 a few days ago, SIB Visions CEO Roland Hörmann clearly talked about this topic, especially about the details of migrating from Oracle's proprietary database to PostgreSQL.

Hörmann said, “If customers ask which database they should choose for a project, I will always answer Postgres, even after 20 years of Oracle’s development. There is no reason not to choose Postgres: it’s open source and achievable. Yes, and it will be better."

"If you need it, you can get support. If you set up a database, then you only need to configure the PostgreSQL conf file once, and then it can always run. Of course, you need to set up backups and other things, but you don’t need to be experienced and don’t It took so much time."

On December 7, Ma Max Mether, the co-founder and vice president of product management of MariaDB, also responded. He said that no database is perfect. The proliferation of different models, storage engines, protocols, and dialects all prove this point.

Max Mether said, “In 2016, at MariaDB, we completely abandoned the MySQL code and introduced new storage engines, dialects, monitors, and even ML-based workload analysis.”

"I have been working in the database field for a long time, and I have seen a lot of people come and go. This is the natural law of things. Sometimes it is a tug of war between simplicity and richness, sometimes it is too advanced, or stuck in In the past." "No matter how you want to look at it, Oracle's MySQL has never had a rudder. It was abandoned internally and was attacked by Hyperscaler. This engineer's blog only strengthened my point of view."

For the above "defamation" of former engineer Gunderson and Max Mether's views, Oracle currently refuses to comment.

Of course, with regard to the question of whether MySQL is a "bad" database, we of course have to leave it to the developers and engineers and professionals who use it to evaluate, and we also look forward to the official response from Oracle. If you have different views on this event, please leave a message below to discuss it with us.