5 ms·

MySQL's rise IMO cannot be considered without also looking at the rise of Ruby on Rails and other CRUD-optimized platforms and frameworks. Also ORMs. These thin

by edw 6y ago

MySQL's rise IMO cannot be considered without also looking at the rise of Ruby on Rails and other CRUD-optimized platforms and frameworks. Also ORMs. These things denigrated the idea of using an RDBMS as anything but a dumb table store. Features like stored procedures and views were seen as pointless. MySQL was the perfect database for people who had no respect for databases.

Xorlev 6y ago
MySQL was already ridiculously popular from use in PHP/MySQL applications well before Rails was popular. That said, I generally agree with your statement: > MySQL was the perfect database for people who had no respect for databases.
- bearcherian 6y ago
  The good old LAMP stack
bri3d 6y ago
I agree that the rise of MySQL is combined with using RDBMS as a table store rather than a relational database, but I am not positive that this was driven by RoR and ORMs. Every large-scale system I have worked with that utilizes MySQL (and I'm on at least my third in a row of these systems, sadly!) is/was driven by application-logic database utilization via the "FriendFeed model" - that is, a big fat ID->Document Blob table for persistence and breakout tables for indexing. ORMs and ActiveRecord in particular encourage, to some extent, the use of a RDBMS, even if they didn't get to take advantage of them well for a long time - for example, in RoR "has_one / has_many" for foreign-key relationship, .joins(:field_name) for, well, joins, and so on.
- edw 6y ago
  Perhaps. Something happened between those first-generation web sites where you were writing SQL by hand -- so you could just as easily be writing (injection-attack-prone) queries that made use of stored procedures etc -- and today. A big reason I called out RoR is that back in '04-05 I was railing against its default use of plural table names, and DHH on IRC recommended I shut up and just flip the configuration switch and turn off the feature, but of course when I did that all sorts of latent bugs were exposed. RoR was the beginning of hipster "coding" and I therefore blame it for everything. I'm wasn't previously familiar with the FriendFeed approach to database (ab)use. I paid about as much attention to it as I did to MySpace back in the day -- nearly zilch -- so its etc innards are doubly obscure to me.

by edw 6y ago

Xorlev 6y ago

MySQL was already ridiculously popular from use in PHP/MySQL applications well before Rails was popular. That said, I generally agree with your statement: > MySQL was the perfect database for people who had no respect for databases.

bearcherian 6y ago
The good old LAMP stack

bri3d 6y ago

I agree that the rise of MySQL is combined with using RDBMS as a table store rather than a relational database, but I am not positive that this was driven by RoR and ORMs. Every large-scale system I have worked with that utilizes MySQL (and I'm on at least my third in a row of these systems, sadly!) is/was driven by application-logic database utilization via the "FriendFeed model" - that is, a big fat ID->Document Blob table for persistence and breakout tables for indexing. ORMs and ActiveRecord in particular encourage, to some extent, the use of a RDBMS, even if they didn't get to take advantage of them well for a long time - for example, in RoR "has_one / has_many" for foreign-key relationship, .joins(:field_name) for, well, joins, and so on.

edw 6y ago
Perhaps. Something happened between those first-generation web sites where you were writing SQL by hand -- so you could just as easily be writing (injection-attack-prone) queries that made use of stored procedures etc -- and today. A big reason I called out RoR is that back in '04-05 I was railing against its default use of plural table names, and DHH on IRC recommended I shut up and just flip the configuration switch and turn off the feature, but of course when I did that all sorts of latent bugs were exposed. RoR was the beginning of hipster "coding" and I therefore blame it for everything. I'm wasn't previously familiar with the FriendFeed approach to database (ab)use. I paid about as much attention to it as I did to MySpace back in the day -- nearly zilch -- so its etc innards are doubly obscure to me.