From: William Grosso <wgrosso@...>
Date: 2006-09-13T04:13:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming

Austin Ziegler wrote:
> On 9/12/06, Jonas Hartmann <Mail@jonas-hartmann.com> wrote:
>> cant u run RoR with postgre sql adapter already? thought you could...
>>
>> disadvantages?
> 
> Sure you can. You can even run it with an Oracle adapter. But there
> are design decisions made by the core Rails team based on the way that
> MySQL does things -- and the way that MySQL does things is flat out
> *wrong*. This isn't a matter of one technical opinion vs. another.
> This is a matter of incorrect implementation and basing one's
> preferred behaviour on that incorrect implementation.
 >
 >...
> 
> SQL databases suck, but MySQL implements SQL so badly that it
> shouldn't even be called an SQL database.

I think we're running into a terminology issue here. If we think
of MySQL as a data persistence and retrieval mechanism, it has
certain properties and is optimized for certain types of
applications.

The fact that it's so widely used, and so effectively used by so
many people, argues that the design decisions embodied in MySQl
weren't completely wrong.

The fact that it's an incomplete realization of Codd's vision, and
has some interesting flaws from a data integrity perspective, means
that it isn't good for other applications.

Generic statements like "MySQL is a big sticking pile that should be left
in the scrapheap" aren't really useful at all.


William Grosso