sendob

I don't think you understand the nature of the problem if you think no action by customers was required.

I think the response from amazon was fine and they are clearly not amateurs technically, communication was very poor.

if it matters, must have backups! ( +replication +geographical distribution etc as needs must )

Even a perfect database, should such a thing ever exist, is not sufficient to protect us from a determined disaster

and unfortunately, they are the only ones who can offer support or implement a patch for their software!

With postgres and mysql you can find many companies competing to offer great service, and who can contribute their fixes and improvements directly should they so choose. The stronger the output of these communities and the organizations that support them, the more pressure for even the companies like Oracle to improve ( or perish :))

may be a problem, there are workarounds, and workloads where it is not required, but I agree, merge/upsert is a much anticipated enhancement.

I find the official documentation to be superior for postgres (YMMV), but I think there are certainly more examples / blogs / tutorials for MySQL.

I prefer to work with Postgres when I can, but I also have found instances where MySQL better fit my needs, a heap table, even with more recently added index only scans ( and even reordering the table with cluster may not be desirable) you may want an index organized table (oracle term ) (mysql would say clustered index )

I am curious why even in the context of freely available engines we focus on competition, which I think can lead to great things, but I don't understand the animosity the communities feel towards one another, isn't it just a matter of horses for courses? Are we really interested in competitive kills or improving both the tools we use and our understanding thereof ?

I don't mean to single your comment out gbog, and I know this is certainly not exclusive to databases either ( witness almost any discussion of various programming languages on HN )

This actually made me think of: Oracle's "UTF8" vs "AL32UTF8" which I consider to be a gotcha, even though it is reasonable in terms of the evolution of the standard, a modern land mine perhaps.

The lack of limit sucks, but the thing that annoys me most regularly is that Oracle refuses to make the 0 length string / null behavior configurable to allow for ANSI compliance ( MySQL null handling is worse IMO, makes me insane.... )

What if we think about it in terms of augmentation of capabilities and something that is divorced from this implementation. People want to have the capabilities, without being seen to be entrapped by them. An example I suppose would be wearing headphones at a party or a concert ( anti-social) vs having easily accessible a vast array of music to be tapped at will during the many times when this is not considered to be anti-social. Can we receive more information without being anti-social? If there was no perceptible disengagement? Is it simply a function of developing a social context?

I have a bluetooth headset for making phone calls more safely with my older car (not capable of interfacing directly with my phone), and I don't agree with demonizing headset users, but the biggest issue that I personally found was related to the fact that the headsets were hard to see. Making it unclear when someone was talking on a call or to those around them. The headphones with mics, I find them to be less of an issue because they are more visible even though it would seem to present the same opportunities for confusion.

There was a time when vision correcting glasses were considered very strange I would imagine, but they proved to be very useful and we become accustomed to seeing them. What will be fun, I think, is as others have postulated wearable tech becoming less apparent to the naked eye, so much so that the plastic brick will be considered odd, and that one would WEAR vision correcting lenses mounted in metal or plastic frames right on the face?!

+1 to read only, fortunately databases are very good at enforcing this thing, unfortunately the users of databases generally less so.

RE: circumventing the blacklist, I think immediately of accessing a function with postgresql aka select my_destructive_function();

I have used it.

Adoption was good especially for simple queries, people were less focused on the language, and more focused on exploring/modifying examples.

For people who are already familiar with SQL and as you said, less interested in the query language, it may be almost immediately frustrating.

I can absolutely see circumstances where it would be overkill, I have never tried to use it as a performance critical tool, just as more an easy thing to slap on to ease access, two aspects that I have found useful on more than one occasion:

1. HTRAF toolkit is convenient for very basic visualization (depending upon the audience this can be very useful to have at hand quickly)

2. multiple output formats (json in particular) has been helpful in terms of quickly hacking together prototypes in the past

I still admire some of the work he has done, but I have to also count myself among those who would not want to work with someone so willing to grand stand and just generally so hostile to another human.

One phrase I remember from Cantrill re: Oracle & Solaris was that "People Innovate, not companies". Commits contribute, blog posts rarely do.