4 ms·

That's a fair problem, but I think It is true for other products as well and was true for things that we feel very solid today like MySQL. In other words there

• gfodor 15y ago
  MySQL is a poor analogy because the history of MySQL is very similar to 10gen: a 'hacker' solution originally patched together by people who didn't take their responsibility as database engineers very seriously. It's only after years (decades) of work that MySQL has managed to catch up with database technology of the 80s in terms of reliability and stability (and it still has plenty of issues, as the most recent debacles with 5.5 show.) On the other hand, commercial vendors like Oracle and open source projects like PostgreSQL recognize their role as database engineers is to first and foremost "do no harm." Ie, the database should never destroy data, period. Bugs that get released that do cause such things can be traced back to issues that are not related to a reckless pursuit of other priorities like performance. Watching the PostgreSQL engineers agonize over data integrity and correctness with any and all features that go out that are meant to improve performance is a re-assuring sight to behold. This priority list goes without saying for professional database engineers. That there is such a 'tension' between stability and speed says less about a real phenomenon being debated by database engineers and more about the fact that many people who call themselves database engineers have about as much business doing so as so-called doctors who have not gone to medical school or taken the Hippocratic oath.
  • antirez 15y ago
    I agree with you but my comments are more about telling what is going on in my opinion, instead of telling what I think should be the right priority list. Even if I agree I still recognize that MySQL had a much bigger effect to the database world compared to PostgreSQL, so the success of a database can sometimes take strange paths. But I think a major difference between MySQL and Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, and all the other NoSQL solutions out there is that MySQL had an impressive test bed: all the GPL LAMP applications, from forums to blogs, shipped and users by a shitload of users. We miss this "database gym" so these new databases are evolving in small companies or other more serious production environments, and this creates all the sort of problems if they are not stable enough in the first place. So what you say can be more important for the new databases than it was for MySQL indeed.
    • dramaticus3 15y ago
      MySQL was the original NoSQL. The wrong answer, faster.
    • jvehent 15y ago
      > MySQL had a much bigger effect to the database world compared to PostgreSQL And if MySQL never existed, what would have happened ? Would we have all used PostgreSQL in the first place and avoided years of painful instability ? I read here all the time that fashion and ease of use are more attractive than reliability. And we introduce plenty of new software in complex architecture just because they are easy to use. We even introduce things like "eventual consistency", as if being eventually consistent was even an option for any business. The problem is to not use random datastores. Use a database that has a proven record of stability. And if someone builds a database, he/she must prove that ACID rules are taken seriously, and not work around the CAP theorem with timestamps... 10 years ago, MySQL was not stable. PostgreSQL was. Today, most key-value databases are not stable, PostgreSQL is.
      • zzzeek 15y ago
        Interesting to note is that early versions of Postgres, we're talking the pre-6 versions around 1995 here, were awful. Not like I was a very sophisticated user at that time myself but it definitely ate my data back then - we switched to MSQL at that time which at least didn't do that.